4TB WD Blue issues following power surge/outage

[jdanham]

This drive has a ton of info on it I sadly have not backed up all of it, and I am semi hopeful that I can get some or all of it back. Problem is nowadays when you search for recovery tools there are dozens of so-called solutions with crazy names you never heard of that claim they can fix your problems.

The drive was mounted inside a WD My Book enclosure. This device does not power on at all and suspect that it's system board was fried. That suggests then that the HDD inside was similarly impacted. Taking it out an putting it onto a USB SATA cradle, MacOS says the drive cannot be mounted, needs initialization etc., then I ran disk utility and got an error when trying to fix the MBR. Disk Utility did see the two partitions but neither could be mounted.

Took the cradle and plugged into a Windows 10 machine but just got the prompt the drive was not recognized and needed to be formatted.

The disk when it was working was formatted as ExFAT to allow both Mac and PC to read and write.

So I guess my question is where do I go now? I have had crashes before but most of them were mechanical and catastrophic, or I was able to run a chkdsk command. It's been awhile and I do not want to make my issue worse without getting some expert input to my problem.

I have DiskWarrior for Mac and that also threw an error when the drive was connected.

Thanks in advance!

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[fzabkar]

Don't let your tools "fix" anything. Doing so will only make the problem worse.

Can you show us the Partitions window in DMDE?

https://dmde.com/download.html

Can you upload a detailed photo of the PCB from the enclosure?

[jdanham]

OK I am going to grab that app and send the report. Meanwhile, here is a photo of the board

Yes I am keenly aware of the potential damage when running `tools' on a damaged drive, so I have limited my time with it connected.

Thank you!

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[jdanham]

OK I am attaching screen shots from the time the drive is connected to my Macbook. First the system says the volume is unreadable, to which I select Ignore, and then what I see in the DMDE interface. I'll await your interpretation on this.

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DMDE info screen

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[pcimage]

As the drive was from a MyBook, I suspect it could be encrypted by the enclosure.

[jdanham]

Since the MyBook enclosure doesn't even power on (without the drive), and I don't recall using any of the encryption options so I'm fairly sure that this problem is lower level hardware - which is not necessarily good news at this point.

Thanks!

[pcimage]

The data is usually encrypted by default by the USB bridge in the enclosure, with a blank password. So if you do decide to set a password and “enable” the encryption all it has to do is change the encryption key and not have to go through the whole drive encrypting the data.

Not saying the drive doesn’t have other low level issues, but bear in mind that it could very well be encrypted.

Try some hex editing software (like winhex, or hxd?) to view and/or image the first few thousand sectors and see if you see some “repeating patterns” which will be encrypted zeros.

Or if you can make out the USB controller on the bridge board, such as JMSxxxx we can see if it’s an encrypting one.

[fzabkar]

As the drive was from a MyBook, I suspect it could be encrypted by the enclosure.

That was my first impression but ...

... I ran disk utility and got an error when trying to fix the MBR. Disk Utility did see the two partitions but neither could be mounted.

Took the cradle and plugged into a Windows 10 machine but just got the prompt the drive was not recognized and needed to be formatted.

These error messages would suggest that the partition table in the MBR is visible and that each volume is unmountable due to 4Kn sectoring. If the MBR were unintelligible, Windows would have prompted to initialise the drive.

[pcimage]

As I read it, the OP first connected it to a Mac which reported that it “needed initialisation” and then to a W10 PC which “needed to format” it.

Unless I’m reading it wrong?

But I must admit that the fact that Mac OS saw two partitions is a little confusing, unless somehow it saw the smartware partition with the WD software (unlocker etc...) on it.

I’m still of the opinion that it’s encrypted until we see evidence to the contrary!

[pcimage]

Can the OP provide the P/N or S/N of the enclosure?

[fzabkar]

here is a photo of the board

Can you upload a detailed photo of the [component side of the] PCB from the enclosure?

[jdanham]

Hello all - I've been out for a bit, so here is some additional photo information as requested. Hope this helps. Also I am attaching what I saw in Disk Utility on the Mac.

Aside from the obvious, I am quite concerned that the partition sizes showing are smaller and don't add up to 4TB.

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[fzabkar]

Your drive has two unencrypted partitions, but your enclosure's 4KB sector size is the reason that they are seen as being 8 times smaller than they actually are (512B x 8 = 4KB).

8 x (249.94 GB + 250.11 GB) = 4.0004 TB

You can recover your data with DMDE, or you can purchase a bridge PCB from a 3TB+ My Book Elements.

If you connect the USB-SATA bridge PCB to a USB port on its own, and power it from an AC adapter, does its LED flash? Does you PC/Mac detect that anything is attached to the USB port?

[jdanham]

OK thanks that is a relief. I thought when I removed the HDD from the My Book enclosure that there were not indicator lights - but let me attach another drive + power and see if the LED blinks.

I might need to get some clarification on the DMDE or the bridge PCB comment. Are we saying that this issue is actually not the drive but the encryption that the WD bridge PCB provides?

Thanks!!

[jdanham]

I connected the board to AC, connected a SATA/USB cable to Macbook USB port, but saw no LEDs blinking. But to be honest since I didn't see any LEDs on the board, I went ahead and attached a laptop HDD and no joy there either.

[fzabkar]

https://dmde.com/download/dmde-3-6-0-770-mac32-gui.zip

[jdanham]

Thanks - I did install and run this software with the HDD attached, but to be honest this is an area out of my comfort zone.

Is it easier to just get the PCB bridge and reconnect the drive so I can back up the information?

Apologies if I'm not getting all this straight!

[fzabkar]

Either approach should work.

Just to be sure, in DMDE double-click each Volume and expand the Root. Do you see your file/folder structure?

Could we at least see the initial Partitions window?

[jdanham]

I hope this is what you were looking for. Since the drive is connected to a USB cradle, not via the WD board, is this all just that default encryption that is preventing me from seeing my files? If there is any other DMDE command I can run to provide more details, let me know!

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[jdanham]

And just to answer the question, the file/folder structure is clearly not visible...