Hello everyone,

Really hoping you can help me out here, it seems that this forum is one of the best places to recover a seemingly dead hard drive.

A quick description of the situation: my brother had a WD MyBook Studio 2TB which was attached to his MacBook Pro (HFS+ etc.). Long story short, it looks like there was some overvoltage on the drive, and it wouldn't work anymore when he plugged it in (he works in Afghanistan, and the electrical system is apparently pretty dodgy).

When he came back home, he gave me the drive along with a replacement USB-SATA bridge (he left the original bridge back in Kabul...). I plugged everything in and the drive was finally recognised by the computer, but when I ran TestDisk, I only had two partitions: MS Data, and one HFS+ partition with a weird name which looked way too small.



Note that I ran TestDisk on a Windows computer but didn't get it to write anything to disk. I did (mistakenly) click "Initialize" when Windows asked me to, and I think this is where the MS Data partition comes from. According to TestDisk forums, this mistake should be recoverable.

However, I found out that these drives get encrypted by USB-SATA bridge, which would explain TestDisk's weird results. I haven't found much information online about how the encryption works, though.

My questions are as follows:
- do you know if the encryption uses a unique key? (if not, whether I could another bridge with the same serial/etc.)
- if it does use a unique key, do you know if it's stored somewhere on the drive, or in the bridge itself?
- if the key is stored on the drive, where would that be (i.e. did I overwrite it by mistake when I initialised the disk in Windows?)

And basically, what are my options at this stage? (assuming the original bridge, which I don't have access to right now, is dead).

Thanks,

Nicolas

You need the original Bridge board or find one with the exact same serial and part number as the original. But I assume the original bridge board might have a blown diode or something that could be easily fixed.

Shane

That's what I thought, but assuming I find a board with the exact same serial and part number, wouldn't it still have a different encryption key to mine?