External Hard drive

[xoxobykaci1318]

I have a huge problem- so i have an WD external hard drive (WDBAAF0010HBK USB 2.0 1 TB) and my usb port on the external hard drive, fell off back into the case of the external hard drive- i took it into a pro recovery service, they took it out of the original case and installed it into another (no big deal right) Now they are saying there is nothing on the hard drive- it has all our pics and music on it so im desperate! they have had it for a week now and have ran several tests like- get data back, recovery my disk and Test Disk- The computer is reading the drive but there is nothing there?so if anyone could explain how my drive could mysteriously go blank- i would be so grateful! any options? ideas?

 

[r3xx3r]

dont listen to acewilliams, try recuva, it is free and works just as well as any paid software.

drives dont normally go mysteriously blank and still work. they may have wiped the drive, that is the only thing i can think of that would clean the drive while leaving it intact. you need to be very careful when you bring stuff to "computer experts". a lot of these so called "experts" are just scam artists trying to steal your money

 

[fzabkar]

I can't believe what I'm reading.

The OP doesn't need an "expert". In fact the problem can be fixed by anyone who knows how to use a soldering iron. Take the drive to your local TV/AV repair shop and ask a junior technician with steady hands and good eyesight to do it for you. A "data recovery professional" who can't solder is like a medical specialist who can't apply a band aid. I suggest you look elsewhere.

That said, please DO NOT attempt to write on your drive when connected to your computer's motherboard. If the small USB-SATA bridge board inside the enclosure contains an Initio INIC-1607E bridge chip, then your data will be hardware encrypted, even if you have not set a password. If this is the case, and if you can't find a real technician to handle this trivial soldering job, then purchase the exact same external drive, with an identical capacity, and then swap your drive into the enclosure.

To see why all your data recovery software is saying that there is nothing on the drive, use a disc editor to examine sectors 0 and 1. If sector 1 contains a repeating pattern of 16 bytes, then these will be encrypted zeros. The Initio chip uses 128-bit AES encryption. Sector 0 will be your MBR and partition table.

Two free tools are HxD and DMDE.

HxD - Freeware Hex Editor and Disk Editor"
http://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd

DMDE (DM Disk Editor and Data Recovery Software):
http://softdm.com/download.html