WD My Book Studio corrupted drive, help needed

[paddy1234]

Hi all, hope you are doing well.

My external My Book Studio Firewire died on me and I lost 3tb of my files (mainly RAW photos).
I have read somewhere that I could try and use the drive in an enclosure so I did.
Unfortunately my computer (Mac) is not recognising the drive. I can hear it spinning but that is about it.

Someone told me I could try and replace the controller that comes with the My Book Studio but am not sure where I could find the exact same one. Any ideas? This drive is and older model from what I know.
I would appreciate any help.

Few photos attached.

Thank you all!

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[northwind]

These drives are encrypted based on their USB bridge (the 'controller' you mentioned). That explains why you can't see any data when you connected it to some other external box.

You have few options:

1) Find exact same bridge from other functional drive (I'm pretty sure you can find on ebay). You need to match the CPU and the motor controller. I'm pretty sure I have some, let me know if you have hard time locating one.
2) Google 'Reallymine' and follow the instructions
3) I don't know if HDDSUPERCLONE can decrypt these?
4) Consult a pro. Assuming your drive is healthy, it should cost you no more than a few beers to have it recovered.

DISCLAIMER: If your drive is sick and you follow advices 1,2 or 3, you might end up with a total mess and data lost for ever.

[Lardman]

If it's spinning are there any odd noises coming from it and does it stay spinning or power itself off?

With any luck as Northwind suggests it's just the bridge. There's no decryption in HDDsuperclone, if there's anything wrong with the drive itself and the data is important at this stage it sounds like an entry level recovery, DIY attempts could change that.

[fzabkar]

When you connect the drive in your Sabrent box, what do you see with DMDE?

https://dmde.com/

Does it detect the drive with its full capacity?

Can you retrieve the drive's SMART report?

I suspect that the drive itself may be faulty rather than the enclosure.

[paddy1234]

These drives are encrypted based on their USB bridge (the 'controller' you mentioned). That explains why you can't see any data when you connected it to some other external box.

You have few options:

1) Find exact same bridge from other functional drive (I'm pretty sure you can find on ebay). You need to match the CPU and the motor controller. I'm pretty sure I have some, let me know if you have hard time locating one.
2) Google 'Reallymine' and follow the instructions
3) I don't know if HDDSUPERCLONE can decrypt these?
4) Consult a pro. Assuming your drive is healthy, it should cost you no more than a few beers to have it recovered.

DISCLAIMER: If your drive is sick and you follow advices 1,2 or 3, you might end up with a total mess and data lost for ever.

Thank you I will consider these steps but most likely I will contact a local recovery service.

[paddy1234]

When you connect the drive in your Sabrent box, what do you see with DMDE?

https://dmde.com/

Does it detect the drive with its full capacity?

Can you retrieve the drive's SMART report?

I suspect that the drive itself may be faulty rather than the enclosure.

Hi so I am running a Full Scan now using DMDE on Mac.
The software sees the full capacity of the drive which is 3TB.

First time I connect it to my machine the disk starts and makes typical sounds.
The OS says "The disk you attached was not readable by this computer". It is kind of a system message.
If I leave it like that the disk turns itself off - I would expect it to happen.

If I run DMDE disk starts spinning and so far I can't see any error messages.
Am attaching a few pictures of what I can see right now.

Attachments

[Lardman]

The gibberish shows the drive is encrypted. It looks to be recognised and accessible (at least at the moment). Which is pointing towards the bridge. Can you post a good picture of the board so we can see if anything has let the smoke out, do you have a multimeter handy? When you said it died, can you give us a little more info - like what happens and how it happened does the drive spin with the bridge board?

[Arch Stanton]

The gibberish shows the drive is encrypted.

For certain? People seem to assume encryption rather easily when they see gibberish they can not explain. Does this 'gibberish' look random enough to be encryption (personally I think, no)?

Shouldn't we see some more sectors?

[Lardman]

Shouldn't we see some more sectors?

More is always better , but given the repeating pattern I'm comfortable with the assessment.

[Arch Stanton]

Ah, ok.

[Arch Stanton]

FWIW, as I always like to tinker and find out stuff myself I looked into this some more and it seems my assumption/expectation to see more randomized data was wrong. I took a zero filled sector, encrypted it with some AES encryptor and I do indeed get a similar pattern.

[paddy1234]

The gibberish shows the drive is encrypted. It looks to be recognised and accessible (at least at the moment). Which is pointing towards the bridge. Can you post a good picture of the board so we can see if anything has let the smoke out, do you have a multimeter handy? When you said it died, can you give us a little more info - like what happens and how it happened does the drive spin with the bridge board?

Hi,
I don't have a multimeter sorry.
When I use my docking station the drive spins or I should says sounds like it is reading.
I can't recall if there was a power cut by one day I just couldn't access the files on that drive.

I am attaching a log from DMDE maybe this will help. Unfortunately the scan stopped working after reaching 60%
When it was scanning the drive sounded as I would expect when reading from a HDD.

fullscan.log

(946.89 KiB) Downloaded 227 times

[fzabkar]

Does the drive spin up with the original bridge PCB? If so, have you tried the USB and the Firewire ports?

Here are "tools for opening some encrypted WD My Book drives in Linux":

https://github.com/themaddoctor/linux-mybook-tools
https://github.com/themaddoctor/linux-mybook-tools/archive/master.zip
http://www.hddoracle.com/download/file.php?id=5711

reallymine: WD MyBook/MyPassport decryption:
https://github.com/andlabs/reallymine
http://www.hddoracle.com/download/file.php?id=2662

[Lardman]

I am attaching a log from DMDE maybe this will help. Unfortunately the scan stopped working after reaching 60% When it was scanning the drive sounded as I would expect when reading from a HDD.

Scanning an encrypted drive with DMDE without decrypting isn't going to return anything worthwhile. I can't see anything damaged from the photos and as fzabkar hasn't pointed anything out I assume he didn't either. There looks to be a fuse to left under some shielding but if the drive is spinning with the board it should be good.

DMDE stopping it 60% isn't good - I wouldn't have been stressing the drive yet with a raw scan as we don't know if there's actually any damage to the drive. Standard practice would be to clone and work with the clone. If you want to work with the drive yourself you have 2 options, fix the bridge issues or use the drive without and look at the decryption utilities in the links posts.

[ddd123]

new UFS explorer can decrypt WD Mybooks

https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=38091&start=100

[paddy1234]

Just an update.
I was able to find an older My Book Studio on Ebay. Same model but a smaller HDD 2Gb not 3GB.
I have replaced the controller board and connected to my iMac using USB. Unfortunately operating system returns a message just after you connect it that the drive could not be initialised.

I an see the drive in the Disk Utility but nothing can be accessed using Finder.

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[ddd123]

bottom left is a flash chip

swap this on the boards

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