Damaged external drive housing

Portable Drives My Passport
1

I have a 1TB MyBook external drive. The usb port was damaged so I decided just to mount the drive internally since the case was no longer usable. There are no jumpers on the drive, but when I go in to computer management, the drive didn’t have a letter and all the space was unallocated. Is there anything I can do to retrieve the information without losing it and reformatting? I have about 500GB of files on there that are irreplacable. Any help would be great.

2

If it’s a drive that came with Smartware the drive is hardware encrypted and if you do get the disk recognized the data will be encrypted and useless without the board that had the USB port. You can try getting a new USB port soldred on or try finding a matching board on Ebay.

Joe 

3

Buy a USB/SATA/IDE cable and connect the bare drive through USB, see if you can access the info. Regardless of the built-in software you should be able to easily see the info on the drive

4

If the data is hardware encypted by the circuit board you need that board to decrypt it. It doesn’t have anything to do with the software except that drives that have Smartware use hardware encryption whether you use the software or not.

Joe

5

Well, I don’t know everything, I just pretend to know everything. Explain to me how the drive would be hardware encrypted, I’d like to know for my own information. In my experience I have taken the bare drives out of the enclosures and connected them via USB/SATA and have always been able to caccess the drives. But, that’s just me, maybe I’m missing piece of the puzzle, don’t know. I’ve never used the enclosed software on any MyBook so I probably don’t know the whole story.

6

In tying to teach myself a lesson I stripped the drive out of a newer enclosure, connected it to one of my USB/SATA cables and connected it to the laptop. Via USB 3.0 it would only recognize the drive in Disk Management, and was not initialized. Switched to a USB 2.0 port and it works, I can access the drive no problem.

Not wanting to be a smart-alec, someone explain the encrypting to me, I’d like to know what’s it all about.