@Rasputin... tell me more... it is slightly older yes.. it uses WD's whole disk encryption, I searched for ages online
for a solution.. some of them did suggest switching out the enclosure, as somehow the hardware based encryption
gets corrupted.. has been a year since I tried to get into it yet... anything specific you could suggest for me to try on it?

 

How do you know it uses encryption? (It probably does, but I'm wondering how you determined that.) Is it a MyBook, a MyBook Essentials, or a MyPassport?

 

@Rasputin not to be a smart ass.. I know it because I own it..

Am I missing something of import in your question? It uses hardware encryption as I said. I never saw a 3TB My Passport,
and Essentials does not come with the encryption, which is why I buy those now instead to avoid further data jeopardy.

If you are willing to take my word for it.. I'd be happy to hear if you have any suggestions on how to access an encrypted
WD drive with hardware encryption. I can enter the password.. it spins up, I can see it as a drive, but it shows no data,
or as an empty volume, but the data is surely still there.. the drive was never wiped.

the boot record is corrupted? or the file table?

 

The entering of the password is a dead giveaway that it's encrypted, yes. Some drives are hardware encrypted yet the password cannot be set nor entered by the end-user, and therefore the end-user might not even know it's encrypted.

Some people might have taken the drive out of the enclosure, hooked it up as an internal drive, not been able to get the data, and said, "can't access the drive even though it spins up, must be encrypted" even if there was no actually encryption involved. That's why I needed to determine if you were 100% sure that the data had been encrypted, and not just operating under a false assumption.

As for the rest: Is a drive letter assigned? Has it ever asked you to initialize the disk? If so, did you ever do so? (Hopefully you never answered 'yes' if you have ever been prompted to.)

The fact that the drive is seen by the OS would indicate that the bridge/encryption is (at least mostly) fine because usually you can't access anything "upstream" from the bridge if the supplied key doesn't match the stored key.

My preliminary guess is that the MFT is bad or was overwritten somehow. But your answers to the above questions may change that.

 

I never did initialize it.. as it sounds very much like wiping.. or reformatting.. I was very careful about that part..
so I am fairly confident the data is still intact...

next steps?

 

Don't be too sure about that.

I don't work for WD and don't know all of their product line, nor how every single one of their drives functions, but I believe most, if not all, of the MyBook Essential drives auto-encrypt. Yes, even if there's no "Enter password" and you've never enabled any password feature.

Are you sure you don't mean Elements? Those should be totally encryption free.

 

Still need to know about the drive letter. Is the drive accessible and just blank looking? Or does it not mount at all?

 

yes maybe it was Elements...stand corrected. I never would pay extra for the MyBook bloatware...

seems like you are pretty well informed on the product line despite your caveat...
there was no auto encryption and i bought that version with this specifically in mind..

yes the drive mounts, but it appears as a blank bar in disk manager, I am fairly sure I didn't do anything to disturb the data
I have had enough issues in the past.. to make that the primary concern.. getting my data off the troubled hardware first.

it's just not accessible with any software tool available, and I tried a multitude, it got pretty weird

 

Sending a PM as this is going off-thread.

 

No problem guys. :P

Well, the Seagate tool isn't finding any problems... so what the fuck now eh
Short Generic - Started 7/18/2016 4:12:46 PM
Short Generic - Pass 7/18/2016 4:13:58 PM
Long Generic - Started 7/18/2016 4:15:19 PM
Long Generic - Pass 7/18/2016 5:59:14 PM
It's a conspiracy!!!

What an amazing tool!!! No information about the 'test' what so fucking ever!

 

Last edited: Jul 18, 2016

According to Seagate: The SMART values that might be read out by third-party SMART software are not based on how the values may be used within the Seagate hard drives. Seagate does not provide support for software programs that claim to read individual SMART attributes and thresholds. There may be some historical correctness on older drives, but new drives, no doubt, will have incorporated newer solutions, attributes and thresholds.

My personal take on that is it's partially true and partially an excuse so that they can have the final say about any warranty issues. No one is going to take the say-so of a third-party tool--there's just too much room for error and it is a liability headache.

At the same time, SMART isn't the tightest standard around and is open to a fair amount of interpretation. Like I said, pending sector count, etc. is more indicative of a real problem.

As @jayxflash stated: If you're worried about it, don't store anything you're not also going to backup somewhere else (which is good advice in general). If it lasts a year without failing then you probably don't have too much to worry about.

Everything breaks though. It's just a matter of time. If the data is important then it doesn't matter what it's being stored on or how reliable you think that media is. BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP!!!!

 

Last edited: Jul 18, 2016

Agreed!! Backup like hell! Lost everything right around the beginning of the year. 25+ songs in varying stages of production. Still had some earlier stems on an older laptop we used to use. So I now preach backups and also follow that preaching.

 

I also own a few Seagate Barracuda 1-1.5TB Harddisks. Its absolutely unbelievable how many of them are corrupted.
But when you read this comparission test you can see its a global ploblem with Seagate HDs

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q3-2015/