WD External drives - any special formatting?

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sphinx99

[H]ard|Gawd
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Dec 23, 2006
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In short: family member has a 2TB WD external USB 2.0 number, and the mini-USB connector broke off the PCB and disappeared. Said family member cracked open the case, took out the hard drive, plugged it into an external enclosure from Best Buy, and connected it to his laptop... and nothing. So, the drive comes to me.

The drive itself is in fine shape - media scan shows no errors, SMART = healthy. Connect to a PC and Windows Disk Manager wants to initialize the drive. Tools like R-Studio pull up almost nothing after full scans--a few false positive "text files" and nothing more. However I can page through the drive sector-by-sector with tools like Winhex and let's just say there's data there, lots and lots of it.

The drive itself is just a WD20EADS.

So, do external hard drives have any special formatting for their internal drives these days such that you can't break the drive out of its enclosure and simply plug it in? Any special partitioning? Or encryption? Because, I am at a loss on how to even tell if data is there.

FWIW - Winhex showed me what looks a bit like a MBR (not bootable though), then at least 10-20MB formatted 0s, then data through the end of the disk. Family member said the drive was full of his ripped bluray collection and had no room left. (That's a lot of movies.)
 
Sounds like the USB connection broke when the drive was on.

This would cause data corruption and would thus show there is no FS on the disk.

Even thought the FS may still be there, the drive may just have corrupted data to the point the OS can't recognize it.

I would try an Ubuntu or Linux-distro LiveCD and see if you can recover the data that way. Sometimes Windows is a little sensitive to data that may only partially be corrupted, but still recoverable.

Best of luck.
 
So, do external hard drives have any special formatting for their internal drives these days such that you can't break the drive out of its enclosure and simply plug it in?
Click to expand...
Write lock protection or who knows whatever the WD Smartware software can do to thwart your recovery attempts?
 
Is it one of the externals that has the little usage meter on the front. I think its white LEDs and the more that are on the more full the drive is?
 
WD's password-equipped drives do the encryption at the hardware level.



The data stored on the drive is encrypted whether you set a password or not. If you take the drive out of the enclosure and attach it as a normal SATA drive, the data still can't be read. Smartware and the Unlocker application are used to lock/unlock the encrypted drive (as well as Smartware being a (limited) backup program).



So no, you can't use Smartware to protect other drives.
Click to expand...

http://community.wdc.com/t5/My-Book...Smartware-for-password-protection/td-p/182914
 
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