Had a case come in, where a lady had dropped her 1TB WD Mybook Essential, the bigger 3.5" disk, not once, not twice, but three times over the last couple of months. The last drop essentially seized up the spindle tight as a drum. I was able to get the spindle free, and then spent a couple of days working out a couple of residual issues that I had with regard to bad vibration. Anyway, to make a long story short, the drive spins up, and is recognized without any problems. It images very slowly, but it does move along at an acceptable pace. I found that PC3K was not a good solution for imaging it, so I used Media Tools which seems to get better results. The only problem was when it did hit a bad sector every few hours, you just had to restart the drive. PC3K was repowering the drive about every 10 seconds, and if I selected any other reset method, it would just lock up completely.

Anyway, when it got around 15% into the drive, so roughly 150GB, it hit another bad sector and I had to reset the drive. I decided to just take a look at what I had so far, to see if we were getting any decent results. Unfortunately there is no partition data at all. I know that WD will use a type of encryption on these drives, so you have to run them from the controller. I went ahead and hooked up the cloned drive to the controller, and still nothing. I tried to scan the drive and was getting "media is write protected".

I then hooked up the original drive, and while the WD Ware program launched, there was still no partition, and still got the same "media is write protected error". I thought maybe there was a problem with the controller, since the drive had been dropped so many times. So I had another here, and it was an exact match. This time the drive showed up and was not write protected, but there was still no partition. I was hoping maybe there was an issue with compatibility from one bridge controller to the other.

I went ahead and transferred the initio chip along with u2, u3 and u5 to the donor controller. I tested it out with the drive from the donor first, and that came up and was recognized without any problem, so I don't believe there were any firmware issues causing the problem. I hooked up the patient drive, and again, no partition data.

I did find that when I just hooked up the donor drive to the system, without being connected to the bridge controller, I got the exact same results. The drive shows up, but no partition data at all. Not in WinHex, nothing. However, when it is connected to the bridge, it shows up just like a normal hard drive.

I looked at the donor drive while it was connected through the bridge, and found that the partition is located at sector 2048. On the patient drive, there's just garbage data at sector 2048, it looks exactly like you would expect it to, if it wasn't hooked up through the bridge. There's nothing that looks like a boot sector at all. In WinHex, it locates a lost partition of 2TB, which doesn't make sense either. I scanned about 10% into the drive, and not one sign of a partition. Also, this drive is loaded with images, but in that 10% of scanning, it only finds a few text files and gzip files. No orphaned data.

Is there anything else I might be missing on this? It's a shame getting the drive functional again, and then not finding any usable data on it. I feel like I'm missing a critical step here, and I'm not sure what it might be. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time. Feel free to PM if you prefer. Thanks again.

1) You should use drive for clonning with same family and same size.
2) Start backup drive from the end, there is locate some important data for decrypting. You should read it first.

Initio board most likely alive.

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Angel Data Recovery

Thanks for the reply. I'll do that with the cloning, especially now that I have an exact match drive from the donor enclosure.

However, it still doesn't explain the results I'm getting when I work with the original drive. When you have the original drive connected through the bridge (with the original chips transferred to it), it still appears to be encrypted. I don't know if that is just because the drive is in such a degraded state (it reads very slow) or if there is some corruption there. I'm starting to think that something corrupted the original data on the drive, and now it's just unrecognizable by the bridge controller and it can't decrypt it. It's a mess.

@gtd4242:
If you can supply LBA 0 & LBA 1 (assuming a typical MBR disk layout) when using the bridge which you think should decode them, we can see if they look to be still encrypted or some other corruption. Just a thought...

Or some need sectors at the end wasn't read or this drive has also password protection.

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Angel Data Recovery

I have this drive imaging the backend now. It will take a while to finish.

I have a similar problem.
I received a WDBACW0010HBK My Book Essential as a Forensic Job.
Inside the case was a WD10EARS-00Y5B1
I removed the drive from the USB case and made a mirror image to a WD10EACS-00ZJB0
It was a perfect mirror.
When I put the mirror drive in the USB case I can't read any data.
The original drive in the original case reads perfectly.

How do I make an image of this drive and get it to work in the USB case?
Does the Model have to match? (WD10EARS)
Does the firmware have to match? (00Y5B1)
Does anybody understand what is going on?
If this drive had crashed, and I made a 100% mirror of it, how would I read data from it?

Not model but family.
Use DragFly2 as yours.
M2B, Y5B, 3BB, etc ...

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Angel Data Recovery

Mine is still imaging. I made sure I imaged the last 10 million sectors or so, and I'm hoping that was enough to get the backend of the drive for the decryption. Then I picked up where I left off at about 10% into the drive. It's now at about 25%. This drive is just going so slow, and I'm just being patient with it.

What kind of drive are you imaging to?
A WD10EARS to WD10EACS 100% image did not work for me.
I just ordered another WD10EARS.
Hopefully a WD10EARS to WD10EARS imaged drive will work.

Exact same model and family. Everything matches 100%.

The frustration with this has reached an all-time high!!!!

Just to give a summary of the last few days. As mentioned above, I imaged the last 10 million sectors or so at the end of the drive, and then I went back and picked up where I left off. This drive sounded horrible, and it would image a few thousand sectors...pause...image a few thousand sectors...pause. And then about every 3 or 4 percent, it would just shut down. You'd have to start the imaging process over again. The drive gradually got better, and would go longer without stopping. It finally got to a point where it would image 3 or 4 percent without even pausing like it had been. I believe the more the drive ran, the smoother it became, because if you recall, the platters were completely seized on this, but I was able to work them free. Now the drive sounds and operates perfectly normal.

Well, this past weekend it was about 50% into the drive when it stopped again, and before I restarted it, I pulled the destination drive off just to see if by chance we were making any progress with gaining access to the partition. Much to my surprise, the partition showed up, and everything looked absolutely PERFECT!! I was elated. I went to open files, and only a handful out of the ones I tried actually opened, so I knew we just needed to keep imaging. If there had been better results with the files I opened, I would have just copied over everything I could at that point, but I knew it needed to clean itself up a little in order to get a good recovery.

Well, now the imaging completed, and I go to hook up the destination drive and again there is no partition. It just shows up like it's encrypted still. You get the "WD ses device detected" warning, and then an error stating there was a problem installing your hardware. The WD Smartware program initializes, but it says it cannot detect an active WD smartware partition.

Since the original drive was working so well, I went ahead and tried it, but get the exact same results. This is beyond frustrating. I think I'm just going to go buy another one of these drives and use that controller, just to eliminate that as a possibility. I do not see how it could work, and then not work after the drive completely imaged. I just don't know.

Must have been something in the controller. Just went out and got another one, and the drive is recognized perfectly and the data looks great. What a freakin nightmare.