I'm stuck on making any progress with a 1TB WD Passport drive. The heads were damaged because the drive had been dropped. Head 3 definitely impacted the platters and made a tiny gash in the surface. Nothing too bad, and definitely something that should be able to be worked around, however, I'm not sure what the other surfaces look like so there could possibly be further damage in another region.

My problem is this...the drive detects just fine, but has a WD Locker password. Not a big deal usually, but in this case, the drive is so degraded with the new set of heads that as soon as you remove the password it just starts flashing and does not become ready. It detects that the drive has a password right away, and you can enter the password to gain access, but as soon as you do, that's it. You can't do anything more with it. No matter what application you open, even PC3K, it just shows the drive as not ready.

Now in DDI, it detects, shows the correct LBA, serial number, etc. but it says "Logical Unit Access Not Authorized". It doesn't ask me to enter a password, but none of the sectors are readable. If I go in to manually enter a password, it doesn't accept it.

I was trying to use the WD Security tool to permanently remove password locking, but that's not an option either. As soon as you gain access to the security tool by entering the password, the drive just hangs and is completely unresponsive. I feel that if I can get around the password issue I could at least generate a head map and image some of the data on this. Anyone else run into this? Feel free to PM if you prefer.

Have you converted the drive to SATA, yet?

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Not yet, but now that you mention it, I can see how that would probably help.

I didn't have a compatible SATA board here, so on a whim I moved the ROM over to the PCB from the parts drive I used. I wasn't really expecting it to do anything different, but just wanted to rule out the potential of the password protection being a part of the original PCB. Just as I expected, the drive still requested the password. Moved the ROM back to the original PCB and I was immediately given access to the drive. I have a head map built and the partition discovered. Just cloning the bitmap now. Really weird.

What is the USB-SATA bridge IC on your hard drive?

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http://www.alfadatarecovery.com