There is a very simple solution to data recovery which requires a friend/colleague with a workstation/spare drive bay on PC. Rip the WD drive apart and extract the hard drive, removing all external materials. Then mount the drive in a spare SATA slot, attach the cables and away you go. Hard drive shows up on computer, transfer files, then throw wretched WD unit in the bin, or better still recycle. The hard drives, not made by WD, are usually bombproof. It’s the WD circuit board that is a piece of **bleep** and causes all the problems. Western Digital, as I see it, has caused more loss and heartbreak than The Iraq war. Shame on them.