Reuse hard drive removed from WD MyBook Essentials???

[Sillycat41]

After trying to restore a backup from the 1TB MyBook Essentials to the laptop using WD Acronis, something weird happened... it formatted the laptop hard drive! Had to reinstall Windows 7 from the Dell DVDs. Now it won't recognize the MyBook so we can retrieve our data! I tried it on 4 different computers and none of them recognize a drive letter and it doesn't show up in Disk Management either. Since it is no longer under warranty, I searched the Internet for solutions. One was to take the hard drive out of the WD case, use a connector kit to plug it in and retrieve the data. Unfortunately none of the computers find it that way either. Does this have something to do with the small circuit boards connected to the hand drive? One was removed when disassembling the case. On one forum I read that there is a chip on the controller board that could have failed. Isn't there any way to use the hard drive like an internal hard drive that goes into desktop computer? Any ideas? We'd also like to get our data off of it.

 

[RealBeast]

Unfortunately, WD Essentials drives use AES encryption from a hardware circuit in the WD case so you cannot recover the data by removing it from the case.

If you can put it back in the case you would have a greater chance of recovering any data. The two best approaches are to use EaseUS Partition Master free version from HERE to access the drive and repair the partition, or use Recuva to recovery data from the drive.

 

[Sillycat41]

Unfortunately, WD Essentials drives use AES encryption from a hardware circuit in the WD case so you cannot recover the data by removing it from the case.

If you can put it back in the case you would have a greater chance of recovering any data. The two best approaches are to use EaseUS Partition Master free version from HERE to access the drive and repair the partition, or use Recuva to recovery data from the drive.

 

[Sillycat41]

Thanks for the response. Now I understand why I can't access the drive, however I'm still confused. If the drive doesn't show up as a drive letter or in Disk Management, how can I use EaseUS???

 

[RealBeast]

As long as it is a working drive, I've found that Partition Master can access drives -- my rule of thumb is that if the drive will show up in diskpart there is a chance of recovery with Partition Master, if not it is likely a bad drive and access probably not possible. A good example is a drive that has a Linux partition on it may not show up in DM but can be cleaned using diskpart commands in an elevated command prompt.