My Book 2T and 3T Help!

[JoeySmyth]

My Books have Hardware Encryption you can’t just simply remove the internal hard drive and put it in a different enclosure and recover your data.

On a Windows PC it won’t appear anywhere except in Disk Management and then the only option will be to initialize / format it and lose your data. Same situation for a Mac.

If you want to recover your data off the My Book … you’ll need to decrypt the hard drive first which can only be attempted using Linux.

How to decrypt a WD MyBook drive after its removed from the enclosure?

It can be done. The encryption key is stored in a block near the end of the raw disk (raw = not in the enclosure). That key is encrypted, based on your password, or if none is used, on a factory-set key. Here is a paper that describes the setup: I myself have successfully removed the 4TB drive from a MyBook Essential and installed it into my desktop. I did not reformat. Instead, I set up an encryption layer to simulate the JS528S chip that is on the MyBook’s USB-to-SATA PCB. I can do this in …