Advice on retrieving lost files 1.5 TB my book studio after Firmware Update

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

My story:

I was going to update to Mavericks (but still have not) and installed the WD firmware update: 3.2.4.4. Half way through installing my Book Studio drive died. I have posted about this already on the forum. I have had to take the drive apart and now have it in a HD Docking Station. When I plug the drive into my computer I get the following:

‘The Disk You Inserted Was Not Readable By This Computer’. With the following options - ‘Initialize, Ignore, Eject’.

When I go to disk utility the drive appears but the ‘verify disk’ and ‘repair disk’ are grayed out.

Also clicking the ‘info’ button on Disk Utility shows:   Partition Map Scheme : Unformatted

I have run a Data Recovery with ‘Data Rescue 3’ in deep scan mode. Left it running overnight. The only thing it managed to find were the ‘WD Smartware’ files. Nothing else at all. Being a photographer the drive contained numerous Jpeg, Tiffs and Raw files. The drive was also previously partitioned for Time Machine and my files. Does anybody out there have any advice?

Macbook Pro 17" mid-2009.

Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5

Thanks in advance!

2

When a partition gets so heavily corrupted the best thing is to contact a recovery company for assistance.

The software option works when the drives partition is not as major as this one.

3

I have been given the following advice from WD support team:

We have received your post on the forum that you are trying to connect to the drive without the controller bridge.

 

Please be aware that this bridge is needed to connect to the drive as the data is encrypted and you are not able to connect to the drive using a USB dock.

 

I am guessing that the ‘controller bridge’ is dead as the actual drive start up in a docking station. So simple question, is it possible to replace the ‘controller bridge’ with a new one and then access the files on my drive? Where would I be able to find a replacement bridge?

Thanks.

 

 

4

Some useful information in this article.

http://crashed-hard-drive.com/western-digital-mybook-encryption/

Seems like I need a new ‘controller bridge’ with the correct data encryption. This is getting complicated!

The best way to have the data recovered is to repair the bridge controller.  Each controller version uses it’s own firmware revision, and this must correspond with the firmware that was used to encrypt the data initially.  You can buy 10 different drives, take them apart and hope that one of them works, but it will be difficult to get a match right off the bat that will decrypt the data.