Hello all!

New to the forum, but not new to hard drives

So I'm having a really hard time with this hard drive. It's a Western Digital Caviar Green (WD10EARS) that was pulled from a 1TB external drive. I am working on this project for a customer. I diagnosed the drive as having a faulty motor controller, so I ordered a new PCB for swap. (An identical 2060-701640-002 Rev A). I transferred U12 (firmware chip), installed on the drive, and it sprung to life as soon as it was plugged in. Customer did not indicate whether this drive was being used on a Mac or PC, so I just initialized the drive as NTFS and ran a deep scan on Recuva. It found data, but the only data that was recovered was the data that comes on the drive (WD application installers, user manuals, etc). I called the customer and she indicated that this drive was being used on a Mac. Brought it over to my Mac station, re-initialized as APFS and scanned the drive with Data Rescue overnight. Same result. Tried exFAT just to be sure, same result. I have now transferred over U2 (flash chip, just for giggles really) and am going to let that run overnight. I am not very familiar with newer WD drives. Is it possible that there is some firmware data stored in U5 (MCU) and it needs to be transferred as well? Why am I able to pull factory application data and nothing else?

Then your drive is almost certainly encrypted as nearly all WD externals are if you pull them from the external.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

That was a terrible idea. Now, you've got a brand new partition table and file system overwriting your encrypted one.

Time for you to outsource this to a professional now and perhaps time to rethink whether you really have the skills to offer such a service. Your client should sue you for the serious complications you've caused now.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Actually, if you're able to recover the WD files it's probably not the WD encryption messing you up. You derailed the case when you first initialized the drive. It probably had an Apple Filevault encrypted partition on it. There is never EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER any reason to do that. Anyone who told you to do that is a moron.

Good luck rebuilding that partition table now. No software can automate finding lost FileVault partitions. It has to be done 100% manually.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Now that's something I didn't think of. Thanks!

The user area is encrypted, but the "SmartWare" area ("WD files") is not. The OP needs to reinstall the drive in its original enclosure, assuming it is not damaged. Only then can data recovery software hope to find anything.

A detailed photo of the PCB in the enclosure might help.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

The drive came after a trip to Geek Squad, who advised the customer that the drive was done for. Geek Squad also threw away the enclosure and circuit board, not knowing it could be an important part of the drive. Forgot to mention also that I cloned the drive immediately after the PCB swap to another WD 1TB (Purple, all I had lying around...) Will a replacement enclosure PCB get the data, assuming I can even find a suitable model, or are they per-drive as well?

Also, who's Rambo up there?

If your diagnosis was correct, what made you think the file system was corrupted??

Why initialize a disk to recover data? I think you missed the first class of DR and now the file system if it's corrupted

The first lesson in data recovery is 'create a full backup image of the device'!!!

I thought, that the first lesson in DR is: Don't drop the drive

Does anyone have any information about FileVault?
Or is there any way to play with it without installing MacOS on an external drive and apply FileVault on it? Is it the same if I create an encrypted Volume in OS X?

Yes, Filevault is just what Apple calls their OS encryption scheme. The data will just look like complete jibberish in the encrypted partition. Rebuilding the partition table can be a pain, especially if the encrypted partition doesn't start at the usual offset. I had to pretty much learn to write GPT from scratch for one case, but it's been a handy skill to have since then.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Go to WD's warranty checker web page and plug in your drive's serial number. That should tell you the product name of the enclosure. A replacement enclosure should be enough to retrieve your data, albeit with a corrupted file system.

Alternatively, there are freeware tools that should be able to decrypt your drive.

reallymine: WD MyBook/MyPassport decryption:
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=1488

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

It is not about being "Rambos", but you have to be careful when working with third party data (customers). His sequence of actions indicates that he has a very basic knowledge of data recovery.

Don't take this the wrong way, everyone can be wrong and everyone has something to learn, but in my country there is a saying that says, "if you don't know, why do you get into?".

As spildit told you, if you get the SATA-USB bridge right and have the clone (???) you have probably solved the problem, or you can use Fzabkar's suggestion "reallymine".

I'm not sure, but the OP could be referring to Don Quixote in my avatar. :?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.