Sudden Partition loss of Mybook 2TB

Hi all,
I’ve backed up a laptop contents to a 2TB western digital external hard drive in order to format it for a fresh install of OS, the drive was only a few months old and it was working fine, after the OS install I was shocked when the External HDD wasn’t recognized by the system, basically it lost its only partition and is asking me to initialize the HDD (oops.) well, I didn’t do that and tried several data recovery software but they didn’t come up with any thing useful and most of them didn’t come up with anything at all.  :x
I’ve recovered data from several hard drives before and this situation doesn’t make any sense, since I’ve already removed the drive from the enclosure and connected it directly to SATA, still the same problem, these programs just take forever to scan the drive it’s more than a week now I’m continuously trying to get any data out of it.
the drive is mechanically fine, no irregular sounds, and is working relatively fast.
all SMART tests using WD DLG came up OK, some programs reported a couple of Bad sectors, but still no valid data.
If anyone can help me with this. my next thought is to force the recovery software to read the data in a certain way. with certain partition table characteristics and sector size.
However I don’t recall what was the original partiton table type and sector size was since I didn’t format that drive since I purchased it.
Can anyone tell me what is the default settings for WD My Book Essential 2TB usb3?
is it MBR or GPT? What is the default sector size(Allocation unit size)? and what is the default file system (Fat32, exFat, NTFS,…)?
Thanks In advance

Since you reformat your comp, you just need to install the driver. That should be the first thing you’ve done before anything else.

the problem now is in the external drive (My Book) I’ve tried it on several other computers but still no data can be found.

Update: Teskdisk recovery software reported 3 (MS DATA) partitions on the drive so far (47% complete)while scanning for GPT partitions! and I still don’t know which one of these 3 is my real NTFS partition would be.

Update: the TestDisk scan has been completed this morning but the 3 dummy partitions were not recoverable (their start and end wasn’t right anyway :slight_smile: ) I have only one partition as it was out of the box, I didn’t do any formatting or partition. just used it as it is!

One thought I have though, could the problem be in the controller board, so the drive thinks its reading, but it’s not reading the right data? I mean is there a possibility that the media is ok, partition table is good, so as the filesystem, but it’s the controller board is unable to read it in the right way?