WD external drive won`t work please help!

Jericho.u.k · 12 May 2018 at 19:46

Hi all
I recently moved house and somehow my external drive is no longer working. I really need to try and fix it as it had a lot of things on it that I need to access. Basically I have 1 port on my pc where it seems to respond a little but all the other usb ports I get nothing. In the 1 usb port I just get the windows usb connection sound repeating and the light flashes on the drive for a split second but I cannot even feel the drive moving at all. The drive is the 1 in the link.

https://www.bing.com/images/search?...608006799765933026&selectedIndex=2&ajaxhist=0

Hope somebody can help and thank you for any help in advance

EssexBoy · 12 May 2018 at 20:01

take drive out and connect to motherboard

Jericho.u.k · 12 May 2018 at 20:13

EssexBoy said:
take drive out and connect to motherboard

Is this possible then. I didn't realise it could be so simple as it uses a different kind of connection to the back of the drive and also needs a dc power cable.

EssexBoy · 12 May 2018 at 20:19

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjfRYfN4jfM

Easier to explain with video.Unless your drive is soldered to the usb controller it should be straight forward like video.

Jericho.u.k · 12 May 2018 at 21:09

Thanks bud ill give this a try tomorrow.
I have built a bunch of pc`s before so will be straightforward. I just thought the external would be somehow different inside......doh

Jericho.u.k · 13 May 2018 at 15:05

Update: I stripped the hd from its external casing and mounted it in my pc. In windows under disk management it says the drive is not initialised there is no drive letter or file system but it see the make and size of the drive. I cannot initialise it as this will format it and I need things from it. I am about to run wd diagnostic tools.

Any further ideas guys?

Update 2: wd diagnostics say the drive is in perfect health bar nothing shows under allocated space.

I don't mind losing the drive if I can only transfer its contents once.

APM · 14 May 2018 at 08:28

There are programs such as Bit Recover that you can try at a cost or maybe Recuva in CCCleaner is worth a look too.

Sasahara · 14 May 2018 at 21:56

A lot of external drives these days have built in hardware encryption. This encryption is always running, even when you haven't installed the software to active the password feature.

The problem with this is if the enclosure board fails your data is encrypted so taking out the drive and plugging it into a SATA port won't work.

It's possible that finding an exact matching enclosure might work, but even that's would depend on how they implement the encryption. I would guess everyone could be different so even that won't work.

I had this problem with a WD Mybook drive. Now unless I want an encrypted drive, make sure they have no built in encryption for this very problem.

So if it this encryption problem you probably screwed.

Jericho.u.k · 15 May 2018 at 19:37

Thank you for the reply sasahara.
I really think this is the problem as I have tried many recovery options and the most anything can find on the drive is jibberish rubbish.
I am out of ideas and also gutted as there was a lot of stuff on it that I needed

Sasahara · 15 May 2018 at 22:06

It's a painful lesson to learn. Always have a least 2 copies of value data.

If it is the encryption problem, I think the only solution would be to find a repair shop/service that could fix the enclosure. If your lucky it could just be a damaged USB socket or some basic component that need replacing.
No idea how much this would cost or where to go though.

APM · 16 May 2018 at 08:46

May be worth re-assembling the original drive and trying it on a linux system.

Jericho.u.k · 17 May 2018 at 22:11

APM said:
May be worth re-assembling the original drive and trying it on a linux system.

Update: Good news guys, I put the chipboard back on the drive and reconnected the original ports on it but didnt bother with the outer casing. To my suprise it had full power but the pc still could not see it. I found and used a fantastic piece of software called Testdisk and the bundled qphotoerec and between them managed to both read all the contents of the broken drive and write them to my pc. The only downside is i have to go through 484 files full of random items to find the stuff i want lol (trust me thousands of items in these files)

So in the end a great result and thanks to everyone who offered help.

Habakkuk · 27 May 2018 at 05:36

I had a WD NAS with removable drives that failed - the drives were fine, but encrypted.

When the replacement NAS arrived under warranty, obviously they wouldn't work with it.

Lesson learned.

Sasahara said:
I had this problem with a WD Mybook drive. Now unless I want an encrypted drive, make sure they have no built in encryption for this very problem.