WD5000LUCT unable to work from PCH SATA port

[MarionGrandJ]

Hello,
I have got an external HDD coming from my ISP delivered set-top box.
This external drive offers connection through USB and I can read and write it from a standard PC running Windows or Linux.
But I would like to use it internally from my PC.
So I opened the enclosure, extracted the hard disk, it is a WD5000LUCT - 62RC2YD; I disconnected it from an USB/SATA bridge containing a JMicron JMS578 and an SPI NAND chip, and I connected it directly to my H270 PCH SATA port and I can't see it from the BIOS wether I use AHCI or RAID settings offered. My Windows 10 PC is able to see it in the device manager but report it as "unknown peripheral" under disk drive category. Partition and volume data are unavailable. The data contained in this drive are unimportant to me so I don't care if I lose them but I can't write anything to this drive through the SATA port so I can't reformat or repartion it.
I want to make it work from SATA, what can I do to make it work so?

[DRUG]

Drive is probably encripted.

If you don't have the pro tools perhaps this can be usefull.

https://github.com/andlabs/reallymine

[MarionGrandJ]

Thanks for your answer.
I imagine that if the drive is encrypted the key is contained in the SPI NAND on the board and in the drive ROM. As I still have got the USB bridge, and that bridge gives me full access to the drive, is there a way to read that key from a software tool running on my PC?

[pikus_09]

This drive has locked SA. Without FW tool you can't work on this drive. This is DVR disk.

[MarionGrandJ]

I'm still doubtfull about that: I can read any S/A module from the WD-Marvel4b3 demo using the WINAPI\USB transport over the USB bridge.
Thanks nonetheless.

[DRUG]

Sorry I haven't read correctly.

pikus_09 is right, somehow I was thinking this was a WD drive from a external enclosure.

[MarionGrandJ]

The drive is definitely external: it is sold, separately, to work with my set-top box but it works in any computer that I plug it in as long as I use the USB/SATA bridge.
I do not know hard drives unfortunately. But according to the papers that I read here and there, I understand that if the disk was encrypted, the USB bridge would authenticate with the disk by sending him a derivation of the key. The key or a derivative (symmetric encryption) would be present also on the disk. It seems that I can access all parts of the disc when I go through the bridge; I just have to understand where to look ...
Otherwise it is something else and I do not understand what it is.

[MarionGrandJ]

Ok thanks for that. I will try to scour the modules mentioned to see if I find a chain referring to the controller of the bridge. Or perhaps I'll try to compare it with a dump of a non-locked firmware.

[MarionGrandJ]

After a long night investigating the issue, it looks like the issue is unrelated to what we spoke about:
I am able to access the drive fully from an old HM55 chipset based mainboard in IDE compatible mode; this same system doesn't recognize the drive in BIOS nor allow access to it from the OS when the chipset is in AHCI mode.
So I can only conclude that there are no encryption on the drive and no specific bond with the USB/SATA bridge that was sold with it.
I assume that the drive has incompabilities with my H270 PCH due to an intentionally limited hard drive firmware. So I need to research differences in hard drive access in IDE compatible and AHCI mode over SATA link.

[MarionGrandJ]

Fast forward a few weeks later...
If the disk runs on an old chipset by emulating the PATA standard, I would really like to integrate it into a recent system with fellows.
I shook the idea that it is connected to its USB Bridge:
-first he worked on a system of PATA emulating SATA,
-After I tried it on another USB/SATA Bridge based on an ASMedia chipset, it worked flawlessly
-then I changed-completely, completely-the embedded software of the original USB/SATA Bridge based on JMicron and it still works with it
-Finally, using WD-Marvell 4 beta and its (new?) AHCI addressing, it works by plugging the drive into the SATA port H270 while it was connected to the USB and identified without losing power.
My conclusion was: this drive is not a well-conforming SATA drive and something in the SATA initialization sequence after the connection does not work well; some careless SATA controllers may pass it on, but others do not.
So I dug a bit more and using Linux debugging and a few DOS routines, I discovered that the disk is discovered, on SATA & AHCI non-working system, as a 48bit blocks of 512 physical bytes (the drive is 512e AF , 4096 physical), present a signature of a SEMB (SATA enclosure management bridge) instead of a SATA disk.
To be continued...