Royal messup, My Book Essential 3TB

I will try to make it short so that I don’t loose your interest halfway.

USB stopped working

Tested different PCs, USBs, OS-no dice

Took out the HD from enclosure-As I can hear/feel it spinning

Connected to PC (Win7), Showed up in disk management but not accessible

Against my better judgment, I figured it’s just a file structure issue. I can “quick format” and use recovery software to retrieve data back

Quick formatted HD, HD shows up in win7…applied recovery software and BAM! it’s just bunch of .flv files and none of my data. Which I am assuming points towards encryption.

Kind Sirs, what are my options?

  1. If I find a working/matched PCB and get it to show up OS. After quick format, will I still be able retrieve data?

  2. Can I retrieve decryption key?

  3. Does WD provide any support for customers like myself?

  4. Sit back, pour green tea and play violin?

So far, I am rooting for option 4 because I see little hope. At the same time, I am not so happy with the sneaky hardware encryption method implemented by WD. I did not want it to be encrypted and that is why I never installed the proprietary software for backup or encryption and no password. Yet it still ended up being encrypted.

PS: in HD world what is the best practice, create a backup of a backup of a backup?

Backup means that you have at least two copies of your data, relying your critical data to one source is not considered as a backup.

Data recovery requires advanced knowledge, I suggest you to contact a data recovery company to have your drive evaluated. 

Thank you for your reply. 

These drives that come with Smartware are hardware encrypted by the bridge board. This posts explains a bit about the boards http://community.wdc.com/t5/Off-Topic-Discussions/Bridge-Boards/td-p/353839

Joe