Recently my Elements 2TB drive died, or it appeared to. The warranty was long gone, so I took it apart and replaced the control board that has the usb and power connectors on it, the drive still wouldn’t power up fully. I can hear it trying to start, the light flicks on, but it dies within a couple seconds. I mounted the drive internally via SATA and the drive started right up and started running, but I am unable to access anything due to encryption. There is a ton of data stored on this drive I’d like to have access to, is there any way I can remove the encryption without formatting the disk and losing all my data?
WD Elements Hard Drives don’t have Encryption … WD MyBooks do
Ok, I must have a different issue going on then. I can view the drive in Device Manager, shows as unallocated and not initialized. When I try to initialize it, I get the error "The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error. I read somewhere about the encryption, that’s why I thought it might have been the issue. Any way, what can I do from here to try to initialize the drive?
