Hi a while back I took apart my 2 tb external drive to use the drive internally. I put the drive in and windows asked to format it. I took it back out and set it aside to investigate later.

Today I put it back in and used system rescue CD to see if it could see the data. It shows three partitions of unknown file type, I never partitioned it. The partitions are weird sizes that add up to much more space than the drive itself is. One partition of 1.07 TB one of 1.69TB and one of 1.55 TB and they show as sdb1 sdb2 and sdb4 no sdb3 listed. The drive is a Wd20eads-00W. I can't find the enclosure anywhere and don't remember what the model was unfortunately.

I ran test disk and had it try to find partitions and it could not find any. I never set any password for encryption.

Does anybody have any ideas?

Thank you

Weird things are showing because the data is encrypted by default based on its controller design. Now after formatting, further complicated things.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish?

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

I didn't format it, I haven't done anything except try to read the data on it. Windows wanted to initialize it which I didn't do and Linux is showing thos

What I want to do is read the data off of it. I have read on here about some of the WD controllers encrypting by default, i didnt realize that those weird partitions were a sign of the encryption. I guess without having the original enclosure and not knowing what enclosure it was in to get another to use, I can't get the data? I see some references to mhdd being able to unencrypt in certain cases but also some recent posts saying without the controller board there is no hope?

What you could do is possibly find the USB device info string in the windows registry, on a PC that this HDD was connected to when it was in the enclosure. At least you might be able to find out what the enclosure was.

Try keys like

Thank you very much, I will check. I think that I have reinstalled the os on that machine since the drive was connected but it is something to at least try.

Sorry, I misread the info about formatting.
The easiest way to check what external model the drive came from is to check with the warranty site.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Thank you labtech, very appreciated.