Please recommend reliable and trusted Data Recovery Professionals

Hi Kbelhaj8 (sorry don't know your real name).

If the drive was removed from a My Passport enclosure and connected by direct SATA, very likely the data is encrypted. Most My Passports hardware encrypt data by default just in case you want to set a password later on. Often you can simply replace the USB bridge board that failed to decrypt the data, but there is a number on there you need to match to find a suitable replacement. If you don't have that, then it'll require a tool like PC-3000 (very expensive) to recognize the encryption type, extract the disk encryption key from the drive's firmware, and then decrypt the data. We deal with these on a daily basis here at our lab (Data Medics) and most are relatively easy straightforward cases for us.

Here's a list of labs I know have the tools and knowhow to handle such a case and that won't rip you off:

Data Medics - https://www.data-medics.com (Providence, RI)
Recovery Force - https://www.recoveryforce.com (Guelph, Ontario Canada)
Data Savers LLC - http://www.datasaversllc.com (Atlanta, GA)
PCImage - http://pcimage.co.uk (United Kingdom)

There's plenty more I could list around the world too if you're in a different country. You can probably expect to spend between $300-500 for someone to decrypt the data on their PC-3000 machine. Largely the price will just vary depending on the cost of living in the respective country/area where the recovery is done and the exchange rate if you're sending it out.

Just be wary of some of the big data recovery companies. They might try to charge you like $2000 to do it and their salespeople will also lyingly try to convince you that they are "the only company in the world who can do it" and tell you about their "proprietary technology" that only they have. It's a load of sales balogne, don't fall for it. We all buy the same tools and technology from Russia these days. It's not uncommon at all today for a two or three person company to successfully recover a drive that the "big guys" said was "unrecoverable". All it really takes is one engineer who really knows what he's doing.

Just like surgery, only one surgeon ultimately holds the scalpel. It doesn't necessarily matter if he works for the biggest hospital or a small private practice. You just need one real professional and you actually have a better chance that the top guy will look at the case with a smaller company. Bigger companies often make "financial decisions" to dump a case that doesn't look like it'll be profitable enough for them. So the top guys never even look at it.