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WD Essential Book 500Gb External USB - not recognized by Windows.

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January 22, 2014 11:27:48 AM

I had 3 of these drives as WD Essential Book 500Gb external USB drives (with a blue glowing button), and two of them failed in the same way, soon after their warranty passed. I left them on side and bought other hardware, but after time found that there are important data still on these drives.

I was unable to restore the first of these drives to functionality trying most of what regular user would try, and after reading some forums realized the problem might be in apparently well known to the netizens issue with a small controller board in these enclosures. Apparently they were known to overheat if drives were used more than let us say several hours daily (as in my case). The suggested way of retrieving data was to open the enclosure and set this disk as an internal SATA drive. If the damage did not go too far one might be lucky to get data back, and then possibly after reformatting disk use it as internal.

I tried so, but the data were no more available on this disk even for data restoring utilities. I ended up with wiping MBR (FDISK, or PQMagic), and reformatting this drive and it is now working just fine in one of the older boxes as internal SATA drive.

Now I am facing the second and most important of these drives. It did not report to the system in the original enclosure, it still does not after I removed it from the enclosure and being plugged into this very handy technician's device - external USB 3, hot swap docking station, which I ended up in buying for this purpose alone.

After I set the drive in this station, power it up, and connect USB 3 cable to the PC (Quad core with windows 7-64 working well for long time) it spins for a moment, and after this stops and the error code 43 is displayed (Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43). There is nothing wrong with cables, power etc, as I tried another drive in this device, and it worked fine. It must be in the drive but I don't know how far the damage did go.

If I interpret my findings right the damage caused by faulty type of controller board from the enclosure has wiped out TOC, or perhaps even MBR and I would have to go back to restoring the drive geometry by using utilities, but this most probably means loosing data permanently. Is there any better way? I cannot afford super expensive restoring companies... I'd rather learn myself.

My level of expertise is moderately high, definitively above the average. I built systems since PC8086, am fluent in DOS, and not bad in Windows. I thought I should ask here before I commit to one way action. I am thiinking about using software like Rercuva or Pandora, but neither of them can do anything before the drive is recognized. Any suggestions?

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a c 327 G Storage
January 22, 2014 12:01:31 PM

The problem with taking the drive out is that WD Essentials external USB drives have 256 bit encryption built into the external case (IIRC on the USB to SATA bridge using an Initio or Symwave IC), so you cannot read them without it.

And as THIS article describes, just swapping the PCB is not enough since each drive has a unique key, requiring cloning of the original key.
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January 22, 2014 1:21:13 PM

Thanks for so fast reply. I read this blog and it explains a lot. It looks like without spending more than I can, I should forget about restoring/cloning the encryption key hence my data are gone.
Anyway thanks.
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a c 327 G Storage
January 22, 2014 1:35:25 PM

If your data is worth a great deal then you can recover it, otherwise it is not worth the expense. You can also just keep the drives in case you decide that you want them recovered and have the funds available sometime in the future.

I don't really like USB drives for backup, but while I understand what WD was trying to achieve I really dislike the drives with encryption. It causes way too much data loss for consumers.
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January 22, 2014 1:41:14 PM

This is precisely why I moved on to other solutions (RAID and multiple backups) for vital data, and use now external USB HDs or flash memory for one of the copies only ("on the go" copy). Thanks again.
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