Two of my external WD My Book drives are not working

Hello,

I have been a dedicated WD user since a decade now recently two of my 3 TB each external WD My Book drives suddenly wouldn’t turn on. I tried different socket, usb ports & a different adapter so see if something was wrong at my end but nothing worked. So I thought no problem since I knew it’s 3.5 inch Sata drive, I tried using one of my old HDD enclosures for it. I hooked them to my other enclosure the drives are being detected but now they were not being assigned a letter in the drive management and are inactive. It just shows up as unallocated space. I went online to do a bit of research and found out that this quite common due to failure of the sata connection board. Attaching a picture from the net for better understanding

which is present inside the enclosure and connects the hard drive to the pc. Even if the drive is taken out and directly attach to the an internal SATA port still I would not be able to get access to my data. I have read in the forums that the data gets scrambled/encrypted by a hardware chip present on the sata connector.

I have also read in the forums that many people have called WD & they told them that their drives have a hardware encryption etc and also that a HDD recovery service said they can get the info for them & decrypt the drive but its obviously incredibly expensive. Which I do not want to waste my money on.

Does anyone know how I can personally go about decrypting my HDD?

I also read about the Hardware Encryption Compatibility Matrix at this link

https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=15150

I want to ask that I want to buy a new WD enclosure for my drive so I do not lose my precious
data which is on it. I live in Pakistan I am willing to pay shipping charges can someone at WD
please help me and let me know how can I make this work please or if anyone else has a better solution to salvage my data please let me know I would be grateful.

Regards,
kukashiffr.

Hi,

Sorry to hear about your situation.

Let’s see if any of the users can share some information about it since that’s not supported by WD.

Have you tried contacting a data recovery company.

Hi there sorry for the late reply. Yes I have contacted a data recovery one of my drives had only 4TB of mp3’s in it and I got that recovered but still some of the data got corrupt during recovery. So I don’t want to take the same road for my 2nd 4tb drive. I do not want to lost my data at all.

If WD does not support such options then why does this page exist https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=15150

I mean can’t someone order another enclosure from them at all ???