Dear experts,
I am trying to help a friend rescue files from an external WD 500G HDD and would appreciate any help.

The HD was previously handled by a tech guy which unboxed the HDD (because the box itself wasn't responding) and said there is nothing to rescue. I hooked the drive directly to my PC via SATA. I see a healthy 465G NTFS partition (empty besides $RECYCLE.BIN and System Volume Information). Previously, it was supposed to be filled with family pictures and movies. Short testing with WD data lifeguard diagnostics says the drive is OK.

I have tried scanning the drive for deleted files with several programs (recuva, testdisk, photorec, easeus, stellar, disk doctors). I only get usable files from the hidden WD partition (which i cant detect now) and few other corrupted files.

I have a feeling the tech guy formatted the drive incorrectly and now the software cant detect the files correctly. for example if it was a FAT partition previously.

How should i proceed or what can i do next?
Thanks in advanced,
Rafi.

Probably it is encrypted drive. Could you provide photo of box pcb?

Probably correct, we see this all the time.

So called "expert PC guy" opens the (encrypting) caddy, removes the HDD and runs a quick format in order to recover the data. So of course the newly written MBR etc is unencrypted whereas the rest of the data is still encrypted.

It maybe that the box (or rather the encrypting USB bridge) is faulty, but also possible that the drive has bad sectors preventing the bridge from initialising the Smartware properly. But as you say you've run a full scan, I'd say the drive is in good shape.

Try seeing if the drive is seen by your recovery software when it's connected via the usb bridge, or if it's dead then you'll need another identical one.

Good luck!

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