Veird situation with an external HDD, WD Elements 252A 1TB - SMART status is GOOD, but read error.
What physical problem can cause read error on all sectors? Damaged heads?

I tried to scan with different data recovery software, but nothing found, no lost partition, no data.
The drive was never opened, it runs normally without any clicking sounds that could indicate stuck heads. Any idea?

could be pw locked or some HW error. It cannot access user area as long as we can rely on victoria's logs

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

You will need to convert the PCB to SATA interface for precise diagnosis.

Elements drives are not encrypted. Is it still possible to apply a password via USB? I thought WD's unlocker tool only applied to the encrypted models (Passport, My Book). :-?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

The same board ID and replacing BIOS chip?

No password needed. Now I can read all 100% of the disk sufrace with Victoria, not bad sectors found, but there is all zeroed sectors. User said this drive just stopped working, nobody erased data.

The situation changed. Now the disk is readable, but can't recover any byte of data. Tried another scan with Hetman Partition Recovery - no partition found, no files found.
The drive become unreadable when is hot. If I let it cool down, I can read all sectors but can't recover any data.

most probably it isn't but worth checking as a first step...

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

How to check this?

The drive is reporting a capacity of 1953458176 sectors. The IDEMA standard capacity for a 1TB drive is 1953525168 sectors. That's a difference of 66992 sectors. This suggests that there is a reserved area of ~34MB at the end of the user area. I notice that this space exists in all (?) Elements models, so I'm wondering what it is used for if there is no encryption.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Maybe this space is used for reallocated sectors?
Here is the drive info:

A new scan result today :

If the drive was encrypted, I should see these encrypted bytes in recovered partition, but now all sectors are=0 and it's impossible to recover the last partition.

The USB bridge firmware transparently encrypts and decrypts your data, so you will also see decrypted data. This happens all the time, whether or not you have set a password. When you set a password, the password is encrypted.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I noticed that all recovering data software take about 5 hours to scan the disk and fail to recover data. Just after the scan the drive become unreadable, like in the first post. If I disconnect and reconnect the drive, it is back readable. I can't figure out why

This is smr drive... maybe 2nd level translators is corrupted.
As i know, bad T2 nodes can cause symptoms as 0 byte sectors when reading, but data are still there and can be recovered with professional tools.



How can the symptoms change in such a way?
I just noticed that your drive supports TRIM function... if somebody / malware / "repair tool" has deleted the partition, data are lost as happens with ssd.
Did somebody try to "fix" it by initializing the drive?

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My firmware database:
https://mega.nz/folder/O01DkBRI

How can I check this? Which professional tools can do the job?



Nobody. Windows disk manager are asking to initialise the drive, but nobody did it because the data wil be lost.

The job can be done with professional tools as PC3000 or MRT.
If any data has been deleted and if surface hasn't been zeroed by diagnostic tools as Victoria in writing scan, then should be recovable with those pro tools.

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My firmware database:
https://mega.nz/folder/O01DkBRI

CORRECTION
The job can be done with professional tools as PC3000 or MRT.
If data hasn't been deleted and if surface hasn't been zeroed by diagnostic tools as Victoria in writing scan, then should be recovable with those pro tools.

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My firmware database:
https://mega.nz/folder/O01DkBRI

Thanks for the suggestion. Victoria scanned only tice in read mode ignore bad sectors and try to remap bad sectors, but no sector was remapped, nothing changed on the surface after the read.