This drive came out of a My Passport with the slow response issue. I soldered on a SATA port and cleared the relo list and disabled background surface scan using hddsupertool.

Afterwards I converted it back to USB to avoid encryption and the drive is now recognized by the computer, but it has no filesystem and ddrescue doesn't read any good blocks (skips everything).

Does this mean the USB firmware is probably corrupted? I have tried a second identical PCB with the original U12 & U14 chips but same result. I have verified that there is no password set on the drive. Would it be possible to get a clean firmware to flash to U14 since the master password has not been changed?

Yes, I can clone by SATA but no tools to decrypt it because I believe it is 128-bit encryption instead of 256-bit.

I would suggest buying the correct tools for data recovery....

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

I did try swapping just the U12 chip but no luck. I'm not 100% sure the U14 USB firmware versions are identical though.

The magic sector does look the same as mod 0x25, however neither of them have the DEK (no ASCII "WDv1" in them). It does look like the correct sector according to this post (a string starting with WD then 0x0114 to confirm key sector found). Is this possibly because it is because it is a 128-bit encryption?

If I uploaded sectors 0 and 1, would someone be able to run 128-bit decryption and see if it's the case?

Let's see those sectors

@jermy see attached.

@Spildt I can't really see any major differences in the firmware, and wouldn't any issues have been resolved by swapping the chips? I believe the donor PCB is working but I bought it online so I didn't test it myself.

Are you sure that its the first 2 sectors ?
(Doesn't seems to be, i think something went wrong with the clone)

What makes you say that? Maybe because it's encrypted?

1. On what sector have you found the key ?
2. Can you tell me the marking on the initio chip ?

It's user password encrypted.

_________________
Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.