How to recover data on an external hard drive after using it as an internal hard drive?

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Mayh3M

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Nov 18, 2014
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Hi.

I recently built a new computer and decided to disassemble my Western Digital external hard drive to use as a normal secondary hard drive instead (saving on space and plug sockets), thinking the data would still be readily accessible in windows.

But my computer didn't recognise the hard drive so I went into disk management to locate them. I'm not exactly sure what steps I took initially but right now the drive shows as online, but unallocated and the partition style is MBR. I of course did not format the drive to ensure the data was preserved. Right now I'm scanning the drive using GetDataBack which should finish in a day from now.

Before using GetDataBack, I tried removing the drive and reconnecting the original usb to sata connector but it still showed as unallocated, I'm guessing because of my initial tampering in disk management. I also tried Easeus partition recovery but this didn't work.

Is there any other way to recover the data on the drive, or make it readable?
 
Solution
Boogieman_WD
Unfortunately by taking it out of the enclosure you've voided the warranty of the drive. About the other thing, it is normal for you not to be able to get to your data when you hooked the drive up to your computer, because of the hardware encryption. Although if everything's OK with the enclosure and the chip encrypting the data is not damaged, it should work. Does it show up in Disk Management when it is in the external enclosure? I'd recommend that you test the drive with DLG (Data Lifeguard Diagnostic Software) to see what it shows, you can download it from our website: Data Lifeguard Diagnostic
Let me know how everything goes.
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Boogieman_WD

Boogieman_WD

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Jul 31, 2014
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Hey Mayh3M. Sorry to hear you are having such issues with your drive. Can you tell me what's the model of the external HDD? If it has hardware encryption I'm afraid that removing it from the external enclosure may have made your data practically not recoverable and if this is the case unfortunately even if you are able to recover something - it would be encrypted. :(

Boogieman_WD
 
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Mayh3M

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Nov 18, 2014
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Thanks for reply, it was a Western Digital My Book 3TB. WDBFJK0030HBK-UESN

It was password protected, not sure if that counts as hardware encryption.
 
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Mayh3M

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Nov 18, 2014
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Interestingly when I hooked up the hard drive back to its external casing, it once again asked me to unlock the drive using WD unlocker as it did normally did.

When I entered the password and unlocked the device, it still showed no drive. I'll let GetDataBack finish and if the files are encrypted I'll just have to accept my losses.
 
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Boogieman_WD

Boogieman_WD

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Jul 31, 2014
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Unfortunately by taking it out of the enclosure you've voided the warranty of the drive. About the other thing, it is normal for you not to be able to get to your data when you hooked the drive up to your computer, because of the hardware encryption. Although if everything's OK with the enclosure and the chip encrypting the data is not damaged, it should work. Does it show up in Disk Management when it is in the external enclosure? I'd recommend that you test the drive with DLG (Data Lifeguard Diagnostic Software) to see what it shows, you can download it from our website: Data Lifeguard Diagnostic
Let me know how everything goes.
 
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Solution
F

fzabkar

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Sep 22, 2010
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@Mayh3M, assuming that the only damage that you did to your drive was to overwrite sector 0 (as a consequence of "initialising" your drive), then it should be a simple matter to repair this damage.

The first thing I would do is to reinstall the drive inside its enclosure, unlock it (preferably remove the password altogether), and then examine sector 0 in a disc editor, eg DMDE freeware.

http://dmde.com

You might first like to see whether Partition Find And Mount can detect your missing partition.

http://findandmount.com

If your data are intact, then we can use DMDE to undo the damage. Let me know if you get this far and I'll try to help you.
 
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