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Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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WD External Hard Drive

March 13th, 2018, 3:21

Evening,

I was given an external WD My Book 3TB drive from a friend who took it to a local tech and he removed it from the case and then "formatted it as the partition table was messed".....

Now when I plug in the drive in to my pc either by either Sata direct to the motherboard or by the USB external adapter and run EaseUS against it all I can recover is the WD Software for locking the drive!

I have downloaded the WD Security software which shows the drive as unlocked, but yet it seems the scans cannot get passed the WD security!

Any help on this???

Re: WD External Hard Drive

March 13th, 2018, 4:29

The drive is encrypted, and the encryption is handled by the original USB brigde. It wasn't a good idea to format it outside of the original USB box.

Do you still have original USB bridge?

Re: WD External Hard Drive

March 14th, 2018, 1:28

Yes I still have the usb bridge. But in WD Security it will not show as locked. It shows as open. Any ideas on how to remove the encryption?

Re: WD External Hard Drive

March 14th, 2018, 17:43

hi,
Connect USB Bridge to Drive then scan with Any Recovery software if drive don't have any problem you can get your Data Recover if HDD have Bad sector or any other issue then you must clone Drive first then connect USB Bridge and scan ......

if Drive had password then also scan wont work...

Re: WD External Hard Drive

March 14th, 2018, 18:19

Also, if the drive was completely formatted by the other technician, there is no data to recover anymore....

Re: WD External Hard Drive

March 15th, 2018, 18:53

rogfanther wrote:Also, if the drive was completely formatted by the other technician, there is no data to recover anymore....

Equinox342 wrote:I was given an external WD My Book 3TB drive from a friend who took it to a local tech and he removed it from the case and then "formatted it as the partition table was messed".....

Now when I plug in the drive in to my pc either by either Sata direct to the motherboard or by the USB external adapter and run EaseUS against it all I can recover is the WD Software for locking the drive!

If the drive was completely formatted, then the virtual CD (aka "WD Software") would have been wiped.

Re: WD External Hard Drive

March 15th, 2018, 19:20

fzabkar wrote:If the drive was completely formatted, then the virtual CD (aka "WD Software") would have been wiped.



Doesn´t the virtual CD resides in a HPA in the drive that "appears" only when connected to the usb bridge board ?

Re: WD External Hard Drive

March 15th, 2018, 21:27

rogfanther wrote:Doesn´t the virtual CD resides in a HPA in the drive that "appears" only when connected to the usb bridge board ?

No, it is located at the end of the user area. The bridge firmware hides this area, but it doesn't use a HPA to do it. In fact I believe that any tool which talks to the drive directly (eg CrystalDiskInfo) will still see the drive's full native capacity via the Identify Device command (using pass-through).

Re: WD External Hard Drive

March 16th, 2018, 4:49

a simple anaylsis with hex editor can determine the probability of the recovery.

pm sent

Re: WD External Hard Drive

March 16th, 2018, 16:02

Clone the drive to another WD drive of exactly the same size, connect the clone to the USB bridge, scan it with some sw (Rstudio, getdataback, reclaime, DMDE ... Whatever)
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