WD MyBook Studio LX recovery

[lgtw]

Hi everyone,

I've been wanting to backup data from my old Mac lately before its hard drive hits the dust, and started doing so with what is already on the HD. However, I have a bunch of even older data (2009-2011) stored on a WD MyBook Studio LX. The drive is formatted HFS+ and I usually used Firewire 800 to transfer data.

I tried plugging in the drive to see if I could connect it to my PC and at least read the data before preparing to move it to a new drive. My problem is that the drive would not start at all, no white light on the front or anything. No disk spinning.

I would really hate to see it go, but I know with WD externals, the encryption they use on the drives make it really difficult to get around without the original enclosure, which has failed in my case. I would love to just plug the drive into a SATA/USB connection, but I know it isn't that easy.

Do I have any options aside from going to a professional data recovery center and paying hundreds of dollars to recover my old data?

 

[Solandri]

1. Windows can't read HFS+. You'll need a driver or a program which lets you do it.
http://www.catacombae.org/hfsexplorer/
https://www.paragon-software.com/home/hfs-windows/

2. Some WD externals have encryption, others don't. Some encrypt automatically. Some require you to turn on encryption. As long as you don't do anything that writes to the drive (format the drive or do an error check), you should be able to pop it out of the enclosure, plug it into a SATA/USB connector, and see if it's readable. I would suggest doing it on a Mac just to eliminate (1) as a source of problems.

3. Complicating this, the larger external drives used proprietary formatting to get around the 512/4096 byte sector size issue. Certain older OSes couldn't read the 4096 sector HDDs, so these external drives included a translation layer in the enclosure which allowed the drive to work with older OSes as long as it was in the enclosure. This translation layer means data on the drive will not be readable outside of its enclosure. But unlike (2) it is not encrypted, so you could put the drive into another enclosure of the same model and the data will be readable.

There is some risk of corrupting the data by connecting the drive directly to a PC. Since the data is valuable enough that you're considering paying for recovery services, I would just avoid all risk and pay for recovery. Especially if you *know* the drive was encrypted.

https://support.wdc.com/warranty/datarecovery.aspx