Here's yet another story of a failed Western Digital My Book 4 TB encryption board failure. My was less than a year old. I put it away in the closet while building my NAS for backups. Pulled it out a few months ago to transfer the data to my new 16 TB NAS and it was dead. Just the short blink of a white light and nothing! The hard drive didn't spin up. Like many before me, I pulled the case open and put the drive into an external enclosure and it powered up! Yay! This is when I realized, like many before me, something else was wrong - no data present. So... long story short, I've spent the last 2 months reading every blog, website and forum post on how these My Books and many other desktop and portable drives utilize hardware encryption - even if you don't set a password on your data! Argh!

I did a full drive scan and it has zero bad sectors
I've done a full drive image using DMDE - good god it took 14 hours to image the whole 4 TB!
I've tried using reallymine, but I can't figure out the syntax for pointing to the source image which is on my NAS. I know reallymine is setup properly and running because I can issue commands, read the help info and get errors when trying to decrypt.
I read all the posts by Roberto and his windows based decryption utility, but I think he's on vacation and I can't get the password to his utility archive.
So I'm back to reallymine, but can't figure out the Linux command line syntax for pointing to my NAS as the source. I have the folder shared publicly with full rights to everyone on my home network. I can see it and mount it in Linux, but reallymine doesn't like anything I've tried so far.

Could someone help with either the password for Roberto's utility or with the reallymine syntax?

I'm posting images of my drive and encryption board in case its of use to anyone else.

Hi.
Roberto's utility has to be compiled individually for each case so unfortunately the password for his posted file won't help. You would need to contact him directly.

are you absolutely sure that drive is encrypted ? not all drives are hardware based encrypted.
have exact same drive on our desk for recovery and it is not encrypted at all.

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Data Recovery Pakistan

This thread has more info about these drives: https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=30081
Have you looked at the image using using the Dmde hex editor?

Reallymine will only work with source drives AFAIK, so you will need to dd the image to a new drive.

That being said, if the drive is fine you can just run reallymine from it directly (reallymine does not support in place decryption so you don't have to worry about writing over it). But first see if it can get the DEK before doing that, as it sounds like you might have another issue that probably would warrant not using the original drive.

Thanks for all the replies!

I'm pretty sure the hard drive is encrypted. Windows wants to initilize it, OSX wants to format it. In an external enclosure it reads as a 500GB mystery partition. Viewing through DMDE or any hex editor reveals unreadable characters.

I appreciate the warning about Roberto's utility. Someone did pass along the password, but I'd prefer not to spend the estimated 3 days decrypting only to find out it didn't work!

Please show us sector 0 in hexadecimal mode.

The "500GB mystery partition" is what you would expect if the drive were originally in a 4Kn enclosure (4096-byte sector size) and is now in a 512e enclosure (512-byte sector size).

500GB x (4096 / 512) = 500GB x 8 = 4TB

This would suggest that the partition table is not encrypted.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Here is Sector 0

That certainly looks encrypted...

If the actual drive is fine, and you never actually set a password, then it should just be a matter of using the same encryption/decryption board as what was supplied. That does assume that it was the bridge board that was the problem.

That would be great, except all 7 of the boards I have purchased off ebay and Amazon were also dead. I wish I knew how to trace and test these boards, would make my life a whole lot easier. It seems like guys are just tearing these out of old My Books and selling them as "new." Not a single one actually worked. pft.

The law of averages tells me this is most unlikely!
I think you need to stand back, put your thinking cap on and work out where its going wrong.

You could start by taking the original board and connecting it to another spare drive of any capacity but preferably from the same series/family. Make sure the drive has been zeroed by a formatting utility beforehand. Then you can write some data to it (a bunch of various files) and then check the results with your hex editor.

Done and done already. All the encryption boards I purchased will not pass power to any hard drive they are connected to. The test drives I have used are all good, 100% perfect health. I even have several correct power adapters I have tested as well.

If you connect your USB-SATA bridge PCB on its own, can you see it with UVCView or USBDeview?

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usb_devices_view.html
http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/b/a/eba1050f-a31d-436b-9281-92cdfeae4b45/UVCView.x64.exe
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/USB_IDs/UVCView.x86.exe

Could we also see DMDE's Partitions window?

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

By the way, how are you trying these other boards when you say they will not pass power to the disks ?

I have one here ( Seagate, I think ) that will only energize the harddisk when it detects a usb cable connected to a computer. Without that cable, the HDD stays off.

fzabkar,
Here's the DMDE Partitions window screenshot. I'll try checking the usb/sata board too.

rogfanther,
Doh! I can't believe it! I've been banging my head against the wall thinking there's some guy out there stripping broken encryption boards and selling them on ebay and amazon! I bet all the ones I tried worked.

I just connected the single remaining non-broken encryption board to my hard drive and voila! I have all my contents!

I still considering running reallymine once I get my data off the hard drive to see how it works. But thank goodness I have my data and thanks to everyone on this forum! I have learned so much the last few months!

If anyone has any additional questions or would like any other information on this scenario, feel free to ask.

Glad it worked!

Hi Dears,

I am having exactly same WD mybook Hdd. I have fogotten the password and now I cannot access my Hdd. Can someone please help.

@isam :
You should find some useful informations in that thread :
https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=35048
(It's about the MyPassport series, but I suppose that the encryption system is similar.)
You could send a private message to members “Roberto” and “kaeding” who seem to have a good expertise regarding that kind of issues (both intervened in the discussion linked above).

Have you completely forgotten the password, or do you remember at least a part of it ? Did you copy it on your computer at some point ?
Otherwise, perhaps hypnosis or some indian herbs may help...