Can't Recover Data From Drive - can WD help?

One day I couldn’t access my WD external drive… so I took the drive out of the enclosure and tried accessing the data using my SATA>USB cable. That didn’t work either so I took the drive to a local vendor specializing in data recovery. They looked at it and said there weren’t any partitions on the drive. 

To make a long story short… I’m told that since this is an external Western Digital drive, they would need this other piece of hardware that handles the encryption of the data. Unfortunately, I threw away the enclosure and anything else aside from the drive itself. The local vendor says without the piece that handles the encryption, there’s no way for them to retrieve the data. So, I’m at a dead end right now.

Is there a way I can recover the data off this drive? Perhaps sending it to Western Digital and having them look at it? Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Ant

The vendor was right the board with the USB port supplied encryption and without that board the data is encrypted and useless. The board from an Identical drive might possibly work but WD frequentlt changes them. You might find a board on Ebay but you don’t have the old one to matchup the numbers. When you opened the drive you voided the warranty WD doesn’t do data recovery. Possibly a professional data recovery service could do something but it’s not cheap.

Joe