Hello reader.

I'm struggling to recover data from this WD MyBook. So far I'm reading more than I can understand about what's going on. But let me explain. The usb controller was damaged. I figured I could simply remove the drive from the plastic chassis and mount the Sata drive in a windows box and read it as a normal sata drive. I found out that it's not so simple. Windows will "see" the drive, but says its unallocated. That's as far as it gets. I realized somethings not right here and I started to read others have the same issue as myself. I learned WD uses some type of encryption on it's usb controller card. Unfortunately I no longer have the chassis or the controller.

Now I assume the drive refuses to mount because of this AES-128bit encryption? However I never enabled any encryption, nor did I password protect it. The contents of the drive is audio from co-workers. Sadly most of this was purged from the systems and I had the only copy.

I'm not completely sure what I can do now. So I ask. Is it possible to somehow mount this drive just to copy the audio to my primary windows drive? Losing files like this eat at me every day.

I appreciate your time for reading my post. Thank you.

You need the controller which contains the encryption chip. Or you have to collect an similar controller to read your data. (Assuming there is no further damage/degradation to the drive)

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Thank you for the reply. Unfortunately, I discarded everything except the drive itself. So it looks like it's going to be some random guessing to find a card to work.

I always wonder why people are so anxious to throw away hardware and parts from something that is undergoing repair. Why not wait till the job is done?

Now we have to guess what bridgeboard is needed.

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Using the WD website, do a warranty check using the internal drives s/n. This will give you the part number of the chassis.

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Any data recovery company will have the full range of bridge boards in stock, I can't imagine it would cost much to get them to copy the data off for you (provided the drive itself is OK). That method would be the least hassle in my opinion.

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it is also possible it is a 4096K sector issue and not encryption that is the problem.

maybe put it in a windows machine, disregard windows msgs, run "partition find and mount" and try to take an image of the drive, then run recovery on that.

of course it may well be encryption, but I recovered a drive that would not mount in windows this way.

These are encrypted, except in a few countries that prohibit it.

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Hello, Thank you everyone for taking the time to provide some helpful information. Unfortunately, Partition find and mount could not see any partition. But pcimage your suggestion did give me some hope. I did find the matching chassis which I can possibly order a replacement that will function, and hopefully work long enough to copy every over. Hopefully I'll be able to order a replacement this upcoming week.

Thanks again.

Good Luck, be sure to let us know the outcome

I apologize for post bumping. I finally have the serial numbers, I'm ready to find a replacement board and hopefully recover data. However I noticed I can not find an exact match due to the last four characters being different.

Here is a serial number for example: WDBACW0010HBK-NEWM, I'm unsure what these last four characters represent, or basically how much they matter. If they aren't extremely significant I believe I found my match.

Thanks so much for the information.

Those characters could be a problem. They do matter if they are too different. The first letter represents the region of the drive, and as mentioned, different regions may have different charactersitics (e.g. encrypted vs. non-ecrypted). Here's the code definitions:

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/o ... 705045.pdf

During my investigation for my problem detailed here, I also found out the P/N matters a lot too.

I was able to find a match for my external drive...but the P/N was slightly off:

Both drives are WD My Book Essential 3TB
Model: WDBACW0030HBK-NESN

And the drives inside the enclosure are normal 3.5" WD Caviar Green,
model: WD30EZRX-00MMMB0

The difference?
My problem drive has a My Book Essential P/N: WDBACW0030HBK-00
The other one is P/N: WDBACW0030HBK-01

Two different Western Digital support associates told me those two digits after the dash are inconsequential. One even told me it was just to help the retail sellers with organizing their stock. I think these associates are totally wrong. The adapter chips (the part you're looking for) in the two enclosures are completely different...as in, they aren't even the same size or shape. They are totally different chips.

You'll need to find out EXACTLY the number printed on the chip that comes with your EXACT P/N for your drive. Other chips might work, but that's the only way to be sure. Once you know the number on that chip, you can just order that part (eBay is probably the most likely place to find it at a decent price unless you find a random local shop that has one). Replacing/repairing the adapter chip was a big part of the discussion in the original thread linked in the OP of mine.