how to fix 500 gb western digital hard drive

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williepa2

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Dec 30, 2014
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Hi,
I have had a WD 500 BG MY Book Essentials external hard drive. I have used it with my Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 computers and it died about nine months ago. I have searched the internet, taken it out of the case, bought several enclosures and used a sata cable and tried to insert it into the computer with Windows 7 as it had a spare sata input in the mother board.

The drive shows up as disk 5, not initialized and I refuse to initialize it. Find and Mount software did not find it either. I have taken it to two data recovery places. One place, could not recover it and the other wanted $1,900.

Help! I have to do this at home, I know there is a way.
 
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ronintexas

ronintexas

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Dec 10, 2012
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It depends upon what is wrong with the drive - since the drive "spins up" and is recognized in BIOS (I am assuming that from the post where you used a SATA cable and it "shows up" as disk 5), it is probably a bad USB to SATA board in the enclosure. If you are wanting to access the drive's data, you will need to find an exact match HDD (take a look on eBay) and swap the drives. Sometimes this works - other times it doesn't.

Theoretically, you can use the drive as a SATA drive or in another enclosure, but you will have to initialize the drive to read it (the format placed on the drive while in the original enclosure won't work on SATA) - however, doing this will erase all data on the drive.
 
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DougLYX

DougLYX

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Apr 9, 2011
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look for freeware partition recovery software or data recovery software..theres a few out there
they tend to help u look for data on attached drives that aren't config'd properly for the system or have mft failures, be sure you have enough space on your working hdd u wish to extract the data from this drive to.
 
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D

DataMedic

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Nov 22, 2013
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These drives are hardware encrypted so accessing it by direct SATA connection or any other enclosure/dock will not get you access to the data. You need to find the original USB bridge and match the number on the white sticker beginning with the number 4061-XXXXX and be sure to pay attention to the REV. You can usually do a later revision but not an earlier one (E.G. a "REV AB" can replace a "REV AA" but not vice versa).

If the drive has bad sectors and you need to clone the data to another drive, you'll need to select a drive with the exact same LBA size and clone all the way to the last sector as the encryption key is stored in a hidden sector near the end of the drive. Then the bridge will still be able to work to decrypt the data.

If all that fails and you need recovery, PM me. I can certainly help you to get it done somewhere for far less than what you were quoted.
 
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