I am facing problem to read data from my 2TB hard drive, it’s almost full and with little space on it. Initially, within the usb adapter casing, suddenly it’s not working even the LED is on. So I remove the casing and mount the hard drive as normal hard disk. There comes the problem saying it’s not supported file system in Windows 7, according to the specification, the file system is FAT16 HUGE, is there any difference to FAT16 or FAT32? How can I read the data from the hard drive without formatting it? For your information, I have almost fully utilized the space, thus I am not able to get another 2TB+ size hard drive to backup it, haiz what a disaster, I am shock why the file sytem is FAT16 and so hard to reach the data. Please HELP!
The Mybook Essential features hardware encrytion, so you are not going to be able to read the data directly in Windows. Last I heard they were actually using the EXT3? (maybe EXT4) file system, which Windows does not support directly. You can get 3rd party drivers, that kind of work, but that’s not going to help you get around the hardware encrytion anyway.
What you need to do is put the HDD back in the enclosure and get it working, and that’s really your only chance to save your data
Oh great thanks for your reply. Still I am facing problem to read the my drive data, can I conclude that I must have the USB chip to read the data without formatting it? As I do not have another 2TB hard drive to backup my data
From what I can tell, it’s the USB chip problem, the drive data is still OK. I got another Seagate external drive 1TB, do you think I can utilize the chip too?
No, you can’t use the seagate SATA-USB because you’ll have the same problem as when the drive is plugged directly into your system, it’s encrypted. You need the WD Mybook enclosure to decrypt the data, I’m not sure if you can use another Mybook enclosure to do that. Someone else around here probably knows though.
This is such a disaster, what can I do now if purchase another 2TB Essential My Book is NOT an option? Where can I get a USB connector that’s working for my hard drive data reading? I’m stuck!
Ebay, like Joe mentioned You should also read the link he posted, there is info like if you try to replace the board, you may need to desolder the memory chip from your old board and move it to the new one.
I’m afraid the Ebay one is not a solution to me based on cost and delivery issue, not cheap the board. Someone has suggest me to buy an USB SATA converter with power adapter to have a try, that will be conveninent to buy at local IT store too.
THat won’t work, because it does not have WD Mybook Essential hardware decryption, the only thing that does is a WD Mybook Essential. Using that converter will at best do the same as directly plugging the drive into your computer using SATA.
I have very unpleasant experience about this, I guess I should avoid buying any WD hard drives in future, causing me such hassle, and yet nobody can give me a solid solution to read data from the hard disk even it’s still there? I’m shock!
The problem is that there is ONLY ONE possible solution, and that is to use a Mybook essential controller to access your drive. That means you need to buy a replacement. However there is no guarantee that this will work.
The problems you’re experiencing aren’t really a WD thing, there are a lot of hardware encrypting enclosures around and they have the same weakness. If you’re using hardware encryption and the hardware dies, you’re in trouble.
If you don’t need that level of security you might want to get a non-encrypted drive next time…
Sorry for intruding in this post here, but that kind of treatment from WD is unexeptable…
I had a similar problem in another post and I was lucky to retrieve my files after searching around and expanding my Linux knowledge… I was lucky because I had and older RAID model without encryption…
Why is this so difficult there should me a free program - suite by WD for such occasions…
“Even if our hardware fails your DATA is safe because you chose us, WD!!!”
This is the way to go…If the company feels that it protects itself by encrypting the data and forcing you to buy again the same equipment to TRY to see IF it works, then I 'll not choose WD for an external drive or NAS, ever again. What if that happens later when your model isn’t sold anymore?
I really like WD it has a long history in the field and generally is a solid brand but this is really stupid…
I bought a RAID NAS (which by the way, was slower than a dying snail), to have my data secured and now my nas board is off and it took me 2-3 days just to see them. OK that was luck of knowledge, now if it happens again it should take me about 15 minutes but why should someone loose his time and get an IT degree, over something that should be provided by WD…?
Personally, if I were to buy a hardware encrypting drive it would be completely unacceptable if there was a software option to unencrypt the drive, it would just degrade security to the point where there is not a lot of point in even having a hardware encrypting drive, you’d might as well just get a cheaper drive and use software based encryption…
The thing with HDD’s is that they do fail, real tests of large data sets show that about 14% of drives 5 years old fail per year… Backing up data is important, unfortunately a lot of people don’t understand these risks and when it happens there is anger.
I hadn’t realize that encryption was mandatory and was actually a choice of hardware I thought that all new gen external hdds do this by default…
I found several post online saying that you need to buy the same hardware in order to read the data.
Can you tell me what happens if you have an old nas with encryption or not and it crashes… what should you do then…
Let’s take my own example, why should a medium user loose so much time for recovering data which are there…
There could be a software for everyone else then.
And actually encryption methods should be independent of the hardware so the same data with the proper software and the encryption key could be read elsewhere…
I “inherited” a Passport Ultra. Once I knew what the situation with encryption is on these drives, I realized that it could only be used for very transient purposes. This makes sense for a portable drive which might present a security risk were it lost or stolen. However, it clearly does not make sense as a long-term backup medium. I do find it rather surprising that there are so many reports of hardware failure on these units.
On the NAS question, if it is not encrypted, the next question is whether it contains a RAID, and then, what flavor of RAID. If it is RAID 0, then success of recovery depends on the health of all the drives involved. Odds of failure for a RAID 0 is the odds of a single drive, divided by the number of drives. While this is a most pessimistic estimate, which might not come true, it is the only sensible way to look at a non-redundant array.
Your odds of recovering data get much better if the array is a 1, 5, 10, or other fault-tolerant setup. The point I’m trying to make is that there are always risks involved with storage media. You have to make appropriate choices depending on your purposes, and on the importance of the data.
I have to agree with Zatick, that if keeping data secure from unwanted access were a critical issue, I would not want any sort of back door option out there. The answer then, if you cannot make another copy of the data on an encrypted drive in fairly short order, is that you should have more than one drive and copy the data to both immediately.
Usually a NAS is set up with some redundancy, meaning more than 1 drive needs to die before you lose any data.
If more than 1 drive does die and the raid becomes offline it really depends on the NAS manufacturer. If the drives are completely non-accessible then the data is gone, if it’s something like bad sectors you can sometimes recover most of the data but going in through SSH and using linux commands.
RAID is not a backup, even a NAS unit should really be backed up…
One other thing to note, often if the NAS unit itself fails you need to get another NAS unit of the same model, or sometimes from the same manufacturer to recover your data. So usually a NAS unit is like the hardware encryption on these HDD’s in that manner…
You should also read the link he posted, there is info like if you try to replace the board, you may need to desolder the memory chip from your old board and move it to the new one.