WD 2TB External HDD My Book Essential 3.0 & 2.0 USB with Power - Data not showing

Hello,

Please help me out to retrieve my data back.  I have purchased a WD 2TB External HDD My Book Essential 3.0 USB with Power 6 months back (Model No. WDBACW0020HBK-BESN).  I had a data of 1.7TB in that.  Last 3 weeks back when I Connected the HDD to PC, for detecting the Drive it used  take 15 mins and if I tried to copy the data to the WD 2TB HDD for just 10MB it used to show 1/2 or 1 hour and after 15 mins it used give a error message can’t copy data.  Immediately I taught there must be some problem with HDD and then taught of taking all my data backup.  When I tried to take the backup from WD 2TB HDD to other source, for 10MB file it was showing 60 minutes and sometimes 234 mins, later after few minutes it’s used to give error message as can’t copy the data.  

Later I taught if I remove casing and connect the hard drive directly to the system I could get the data back.  After removing the casing and connecting to the system internally, the hard drive was showing unallocated space.  When I  insert the external chip to the HDD I could view my data and to detect the HDD it used to take 15 mins.  Then I taught there must be external chip problem and I took the cloth and cleaned it and inserted it to the HDD, from then on wards I’m not able to see My Data at all,  now the HDD detects soon and shows unallocated.  Later I searched in net and tried installed firmware and updating it, nothing worked out.  I tried in XP, 7 and Linux connecting the HDD but of no use.  Please Note: I have not formatted HDD.  Later I purchased one more Ext. HDD WD 2TB and removed the casing of it and tried connecting to the Old HDD 2TB (which had problem) again I used to get the same message as Unallocated Disk, after that when I checked the new 2TB WD HDD model it was different  (WDBACW0020HBK-SESN).  Now I don’t know what to do, do I want to restore the volume Id of the chip or try for data recovery.  I had lot of my photography video notes, Video notes on Painting, Music files, movies, games, software’s, pictures, documents, etc… Please help in retrieving my data back.

FYI: I tired data recovery using Stellar and Phoenix inserting the external chip, here too after few minutes the data recovery used to stop.  But if I connect only HDD internally and give for recovery it is taking too much of time for scanning and after few days running continuous I would have electricity cut downs, so again I have to restart it from the beginning.  Please Please help me out

You can use either Recuva or Photorec in order to retrieve the data, on the other hand you just void the warranty removing the drive enclosure.

if you’re trying to use data recovery software with the drive outside the case, it won’t work.  those internal drives are hardware encrypted, so nothing will work on them unless the drive is in the case.  try doing a partition recovery with the drive in the case and see if that works.

I tried once again using other data recovery software called Ontrack data recovery 

EasyRecovery™ data Recovery Professional

while trying to recover in this it’s give a message as physical hdd error and when I did disk check for errors it’s showing I/O error on sector.  But in Stellar and Phoenix the data recovery is going on but it’s take too long time and in between I get the power cuts and I have start with the beginning.  Is there any software where we can remove hardware encryption of this WD WDD

I tired with Recuva this help if only the drive is detected as C: or D: etc… If it is unallocated then this software is of no use.

octshik wrote:

I tried once again using other data recovery software called Ontrack data recovery 

EasyRecovery™ data Recovery Professional

 

while trying to recover in this it’s give a message as physical hdd error and when I did disk check for errors it’s showing I/O error on sector.  But in Stellar and Phoenix the data recovery is going on but it’s take too long time and in between I get the power cuts and I have start with the beginning.  Is there any software where we can remove hardware encryption of this WD WDD

no there isn’t.  hardware encryption is part of the drive firmware.

I had a similar problem with a WD external USB drive My Passport, version 320 Gb with a Scorpio drive inside, and I allways had I/O errors with any PC or laptop. But the minute I boot my laptop with a Knoppix CD (bootable Linux) I could see and retrieve all the files inside to another USB external WD Essential, with the Knoppix file manager.  By any reason, Windows XP never could recognize and operate this drive by a USB connection.