WD 4TB MyBook Studio

[daRecoM]

Good day,

We received this hard drive from our client, she dropped it and couldn't access via the USB port.

We checked the drive and it isn't that big of the problem, it's detected correctly and we have made an image of the entire hard drive, twice (DDI 4) with only approx. 1000 aborted sectors

We plugged the imaged drive with the USB bridge controller (this is the one came in with the patient drive, confirmed) and connect it to one of our computers via USB cable, it shows

And when i checked the computer management --> Disk Management, I see this

If I go ahead and initialize it, the process fail to execute with I/O error

We have received quite a bit of WD MyBook 2TB here and we have not seen this issue before.

Has it got something to do with the encryption issue on this model? Please help

Thanks

Best regards,
Darecom

[MindMergepk]

what if you connect clone disk to sata port instead of usb ?
I/O error has nothing to do with encryption.

did you miss any of the key sectors while imaging e.g boot sector, partition sector etc ?

[F_ARG]

Hi! Does the destination (clone) hdd has the same LBAs than the patient?

Beside that, as MindMergepk suggested I/O error has nothing to do with encryption. Maybe the USB bridge controller is damaged.

Best!

F

[data-medics]

If you look carefully at the first picture, you can see the drive is showing as -1 byte size. That's why everything is greyed out, it's probably a hardware failure.

Attachments

[fzabkar]

@daRecoM, "initialising" a drive is data destructive.

The USB bridge is communicating with the PC host, so if there is a hardware problem with the bridge, I would check whether the drive is spinning. If not, then there is probably an 8-pin dual MOSFET IC that is not switching the +5V and +12V supplies to the drive. This IC can easily be bypassed with two wire links.

[daRecoM]

@daRecoM, "initialising" a drive is data destructive.

The USB bridge is communicating with the PC host, so if there is a hardware problem with the bridge, I would check whether the drive is spinning. If not, then there is probably an 8-pin dual MOSFET IC that is not switching the +5V and +12V supplies to the drive. This IC can easily be bypassed with two wire links.

Hi fzabkar, I've double check on this one before my reply. Yes, the drive does spin up when I connect the USB cable to the PC. Can we safely assume that the USB bridge controller is working? It that's the case, what else can be the problem?

[daRecoM]

Guys,

You won't believe this, while I'm scratching my head of what's going wrong with this hard drive I connected the destination drive straight to the SATA cable from the PC and ... I'm recovering the data now .

I have done recovery from WD MyBook for quite a long time, this is the first time I'm getting data straight from the destination drive without the USB bridge controller (I remembered clearly that the hex value of the patient drive looked almost identical which tells me that the drive is encrypted, it turned out quite difference from what I know... strange!!!!!)

Anyway, thanks guys for all the information. Really appreciate that.
Special thanks to fzabkar, I have only posted a few question here in hddguru forum so far and I almost received your help every single time. THANKSSS fzabkar