WD My Book Error

[Soham1080p]

I had a WD My Book external Hard Drive, with 1.5 TB of storage. This one requires external power.

I had around 1 TB of Data on it already and it was still filling, but one day, the Hard Drive stopped showing up in the Hard Drive list, but it was still powered (the problem was that the board which translates SATA to USB had broken). So I got a new casing for it and strapped it up and plugged it in. The drive was recognized but all my data was gone.

Right now I am running some recovery programs to see if it is just some error in communication between the computer and the board (which converts SATA to USB). But then I also remembered that before this happened, when I plugged in my Hard Drive with its original casing, a Virtual CD Drive with some SES drivers also used to pop up. So I downloaded those drivers from the WD website and installed them, but they didn't help, because on my computer, the drive is identified as a Generic USB Device, so the driver probably cannot recognize it.

Is there any way I could by-pass the board configurations so that the driver could recognize it? Would plugging it in directly to the Motherboard help?

Thanks!

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there Soham1080p,

WD My Books are hardware encrypted. The data will not be accessible if the drive is outside its enclosure(connected via SATA or another enclosure).
In case the data is really important, I would advise you to contact a data recovery company. You can check these out: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=kAehII
Apart from that, I have seen across forums that some users order exactly the same(model number) donor drive and swap the boards. Though, you can't really be sure whether this will work out.

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD

 

[Soham1080p]

But my harddrive is not showing up as inaccessible. It is just showing 1.4 TB of free space.

Is there any software that could solve this?

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Free space (and possibly warning about a corrupted partition table) is what I'd expect an encrypted drive to do.

I've also heard that certain models don't have encryption, but the emulated CD drive pushes the start of the drive presented to the PC back. If you know how far this is, it may be possible to mount the drive. Or that the encryption key is stored at the end of the drive (WTF!?).

 

[Soham1080p]

Hi there Soham1080p,

WD My Books are hardware encrypted. The data will not be accessible if the drive is outside its enclosure(connected via SATA or another enclosure).
In case the data is really important, I would advise you to contact a data recovery company. You can check these out: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=kAehII
Apart from that, I have seen across forums that some users order exactly the same(model number) donor drive and swap the boards. Though, you can't really be sure whether this will work out.

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD

I got another WD My Book and swapped the cases, but this time the WD Virtual Drive (With the software) comes up, but the main HDD does not. Maybe the problem is that the original My Book is 1110, but the new one is a My Book 1112.

Still continuing to try, keep me posted with solutions.
Thanks!

 

[D_Know_WD]

Yeah, this might be the reason,

I would also advise you to open up a new thread specifically stating something like "PCB board swap' or something. Furthermore, this is already marked as a solved one. There are some users that have experience with that. I shouldn't really comment on that matter.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD