Hi,

I can't recover my files from my "formatted" drive.

Recently my hard drive failed (Western Digital WD500AADS). It wouldn't start overnight, no more reaction, no more spinning disc noise. So I changed the electronic card of the disk (PCB), and recovered the bios circuit from the old card. Then, the disc starts and is recognized by the system. Unfortunately, my partition was not found. So I used several data recovery software to find my files:
- Photorec
- Stellar Data Recovery
- Wondershare Recoverit

In any case I get inconsistent data:
- BMP files of several GB unreadable
- Smaller files of all formats (exe, zip, txt…) unreadable to
- PNG and HTML files appear to be from a Backup WD software manual

At present, I couldn't find any of my photos and videos (mainly jpg and mp4). How can I recover my data?
Is there an operation to perform on the disk before starting the recovery?
Is there better software out there?

Thank you for your answers.

Did you format the drive or did it just have electrical problems. Try R-studio, DMDE or ufs explorer.

What file system was it, What you can recover depends on if/how you formatted the drive.

_________________
Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

I suspect that this drive has been removed from a My Book Essentials enclosure. These enclosures are encrypted. The "WD" files would be those files in the unencrypted SmartWare area (Virtual CD) at the end of the drive.

There are free tools to decrypt and mount your drive under Linux. However, the easiest solution is to reattach the drive to its USB-SATA bridge PCB, assuming this is still functional.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thank you for your answers,

Lardman:
I didn’t format the drive, it was just an electrical problem. I suppose it was NTFS because it was use on a Windows. I will try to get and use this software you recommend me, thanks.

Fzabkar:
Unfortunately, the USB-SATA bridge PCB was the component which “roasted” the drive. So, I am going to find this tool to decrypt the drives and try it. Thank you for your lead.

I'll try things out and let you know.

Here are tools for opening/mounting some encrypted WD My Book drives in Linux:

https://github.com/themaddoctor/linux-mybook-tools
https://github.com/themaddoctor/linux-mybook-tools/archive/master.zip
http://www.hddoracle.com/download/file.php?id=5711

Here is a decryptor (reallymine):

https://github.com/andlabs/reallymine
http://www.hddoracle.com/download/file.php?id=2662

If you still have the USB-SATA bridge PCB, there may be a simple DIY fix, if you have a soldering iron. Alternatively, you may be able to use SATA extension cables. I would need to see a photo of your PCB, though.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Don't waste your time scanning the drive it will be encrypted as per fzabkar post, I missed the pointers that it was an external drive. Post some pictures of the bridge pcb in case it's something straightforward. Did you use a laptop power connector with it?

_________________
Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

It's all good, I finally got my photos back!

The disk was well encrypted. So I used realmine and it worked fine. I then got an .img file from which I was able to recover my files with Photorec.

In sum, I performed the following 3 steps:
- Replace the PCB by resoldering the bios of the old one
- Decrypt disk using realmine
- Recover my photos using photorec by scanning the resulting image

Thanks very much for your help !

PhotoRec is a file carver. It doesn't correctly recover fragmented files, or original file names, so be prepared for corruption.

DMDE may have been a better tool, depending on the nature of the file system damage, or perhaps partition damage.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.