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I have a problem, and I don't understand what tesdisk is showing me. I have a 2tb drive that somehow lost its partition(s) when the USB enclosure it was in smoked. It is from a Western Digital MyBook backup drive.

It had data on it. I'm not sure what type of partition it had, whether MBR or GPT. Windows shows it as unallocated.
When I run testdisk, and analyze using the Intel, it shows no partitions. If I use the GPT analysis, it shows an unknown partition (photo1)http://shuttsfam.com/photo1.jpg, until it is finished, then it shows only one small GPT partition. If I use the deeper search with the GPT analysis, it shows 3 small partitions (photo2)http://shuttsfam.com/photo2.jpg.

If I skip the analysis, and go to the [advanced] file utilities under the Intel section, it shows what looks like a partition of type GPT (Photo3)http://shuttsfam.com/photo3.jpg, but I can't do anything with it. I will try to upload some photos of the data.
I just need to recover the data on this drive.
I appreciate any and all help.

Thanks!

Hi tokerau,

Firstly, I would like to ask you what type of OS are you using to access the My Book - Windows or MAC? I'm asking this because I saw one or two of the printscreens where showing HFS+ format.
Also, have you checked the cabling of the drive? If it's not seen in My Computer /if you're running Windows/, you could try to assign a drive letter to it. Here are the tips for MAC and Windows: http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/det ... kqbA%3D%3D

Please, keep me posted what happened and attach additional printscreens of the process. Thank you in advance.
Hope that I helped.

KY_WD

Thanks for responding.

The computer is Windows. Not MAC. The USB enclosure for whatever reason smoked, and so wouldn't work anymore. I've got the drive out of it, and it is hooked in directly via SATA cable. Windows sees it as unallocated, meaning that there is no partition on it, or at least Windows cannot see any partition on it.

The MAC on the screen print is very confusing to me, since the computer that wrote data to it is a Windows computer.

Thanks for the link to the tips. Unfortunately, they didn't help. If you can think of anything else to try, please let me know.

Thanks!

By the way, I'm sorry I took so long to reply to your reply - every time I looked it showed that there was no response, until today!

Hey tokerau,

The reason that you're unable to read you external hard drive is that the WD My Book is hardware encrypted. You might not be able to read the disk in any OS. Hardware encryption has been made for protection of the hard disk in case of stolen, etc. I'm afraid you have to bring it to professional who will pull out your files.
On the link below you can see list of official data recovery companies which work with Western Digital:
http://support.wdc.com/recovery/index.asp?wdc_lang=en

Hope that I helped. Good luck.

KY_WD

Is the encryption the same across all WD drives, or can I just go buy another one and put this drive in that (new) enclosure?

Hey,

I really think that swapping the enclosure wouldn’t do the job. Just because that enclosure that you're planning to buy would be for its own drive specifically. If you need the data back I would suggest you to put the disk back in the original enclosure and try the data recovery company.

KY_WD

I contacted a data recovery company and they said that the encryption key is in embedded in the reserve cylinders of the media, and that I didn't need the enclosure. The enclosure is dead and gone, anyway.

Thanks for the information. It will be expensive, but the data will at least be recovered.