WDBAAU7500EBK is busted

slayer3608

Honorable
Nov 21, 2012
1
0
10,510
Hi there,

After using my external WD 750gb Hard drive in a Sharp Aqous TV, it does not show up in explorer.
I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling drivers for it, disabling and enabling, also trying to initialise it in disk management, no actions in disk management will let me continue because of a write error: "Media write is protected".That error is generated when I try to initialize the disk with either GPT or MBR, there is no other actions availiable like assigning drive letter, format ect, which i would like to avoid formatting as much as possible. I've tried solutions for this problem like diskpart in cmd and been told by a few tech's to run several data loss/ partition recovery software, which usually has taken a whole day each scan which finds that the hard drive is full (it should be) but has found no partition or data to recover. I'm pretty desperate to get all this data back as I have no backups of it and would really appreciate it if someone knew what has gone wrong, could it be something to do with the partition table? but I cant find many answers on any of this. I used the WD diagnostic tool on it and it passed the quick test, but failed the extended test 3 seconds in with the error - "too many bad sectors detected".

I really hope there is a solution to this so I can recover my files as the drive was full and I would like to avoid this happening again.

Any help is much appreciated,
Cheers
 
What is the model number of the TV? I have access to some Sharp service manuals which may or may not help.

What is the model number of the WD external drive? Is it a My Book Essentials or an Elements? The former is encrypted whereas the latter is not.

Do you have a cheap USB flash drive that you could experiment with? If so, does the TV also lock this drive?

You say that you "would like to avoid formatting" and that you are "desperate to get all this data back", so why are you attempting to write to your drive? Are you not aware that initialising your drive is data destructive?

That said, it does appear that your TV may have password protected your drive for DRM reasons. If so, and if the user manual does not warn you that this may happen, I would suggest that you pursue a remedy via your local consumer protection body.

Otherwise, how do HDDScan or HD Sentinel detect your drive? Do they show the drive's Security status, and is it locked? If so, then you can remove the drive from its enclosure and work on it while it is connected to a SATA port on your computer's motherboard. Let us know if you get this far.