Help me with a WD MyBook Essential :(

[peppeuz]

I'm trying to help a friend of mine to recover his files from a WD MyBook Essential.
The hard drive spins inside the case, but the computer won't see it.

Unfortunately WD encrypt the hard drives, so even if I removed the drive from the case, I'm not able to read it with a SATA/USB adapter.

I'm pretty sure it's a faulty controller, because sometimes, when I try to reconnect it, I can see the "MyDrive" partition, but I can't open it.

I made it just once: the PC was reading the files, but unfortunately the connection was loose (I was trying to jiggle a little with the connector) and when it disconnected, I wasn't able to read the hard drive anymore.

A friend of mine who had 2 empty MyBook Essential (because of shucking) gave me his controllers, but unfortunately the REV version is different, so they don't work with my hard drive.
When I connect the hard drive whit these controllers, the PC always sees the hard drive but not the partition, and proposes me to initialize the disk (nope, thanks).

I've read about reallymine (the hard drive is a JMicron, so it sould be supported) but it didn't worked (but maybe I did something wrong? I just tried the basic command reallymine decrypt)

What else should I try?

Thank you in advance!

[Lardman]

I made it just once: the PC was reading the files, but unfortunately the connection was loose (I was trying to jiggle a little with the connector) and when it disconnected, I wasn't able to read the hard drive anymore.

Rather than mess with encryption - and I'm not a fan of working on live drives anyway. I think I'd be looking at that controller board, especially the usb port, You sound technical enough to know which is the hot end of a soldering iron.

[michael chiklis]

With proper tools as PC3000 or MRT it will be able possible to decrypt data on fly and copy them on a destination drive.
You might try free tool as HDDSuperTool to decrypt it, but i never used it so i can't know for sure if it really works
http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsupertool

It works on linux distro!

You should check first if there are bad sectors reported before playing with any tool.
Check smart attributes with CrystalDiskInfo
https://osdn.net/projects/crystaldiskin ... _11_2.exe/

The best way to check smart is by connecting the drive via sata.