It stopped working the other day, but I thought it was clearly not the HDD itself but the enclosures fault since there was no activity between the computer and the enclosure whatsoever.
I should add a disclaimer that I live in the middle of nowhere Africa at the moment and I had no access to internet or tech support at the time - I needed my data and I had a spare SATA HDD enclosure.
Anyway, I managed to get the actual disk out of the WD enclosure and into my other enclosure (which happens to be a coolermaster). It get’s picked up but no disk appears.
I need this data, it’s my last 5 months worth of research and is irreplacable: it’s basically my entire life at this point. What are my options? How can I solve this (by myself! as I am like I said not in a technologically advanced part of the world…)?
The drives that come with Smartware are hardware encrypted by the circuit board with the USB port. Even if you get the drive recognized without that board the data will be encrypted and useless. Sometimes using the board from an identical external works but there is no guarantee.
If swapping the board doesn’t work then professional data recovery is probably all that is left. Did you check to make sure the problem wasn’t just a bad power supply? In the future make sure you have 2 copies of important data on different drives.
Yeah, I have 2 500GB and this 3TB. I’m making new recordings on a daily basis though and since I don’t really have access to any computer shops I can only really back up a certain amount…
This is infuriating… I’d need to go back to Europe to get a new hard drive to even test if it’ll work? Well, thanks a lot for the information.
