WD External My Essentials 2TB no power

Portable Drives My Passport
1

I have two of these, one has no power indicator at all today.  Naturally, its the one with all the important data on it.

It has no indicator light, will not spin up at all.  Swap power supply, no difference.

Need to recover the data from this somehow.  Pulled it out & put it in my computer as a SATA drive, which the BIOS

recognizes but not Win7.  It said initially that it was loading a driver for WD20EARX.  I placed jumper over pin 7-8 just but that failed to make a difference.  Next boot it just came up without looking for a drive but cannot see the drive in the O/S.

Any thoughts on what to do to get this to run on Win7 as a standalone internal drive?

2

Hi, sorry to hear that you cannot access your files, what My Book model do you have?

3

It this drive came with Smartware it’s hardware encrypted by the bridgeboard with the USB connector.

Joe

4

My Book Essential

P/N: WDBACW0020HBK-01     0712B

Which is the 2TB version of course.  USB2/3. 

I suppose it may have come with the software, but I never installed it.

5

It doesn’t matter if you install the Smartware or not the data is still encrypted. I think most of the Essentials come with Smartware.

Joe

6

Ok.

So, if its encrypted my assumtion is that the drive cannot be read without the encryption.  Question I have on this is - is the data encrypted on the platters - or is it encrypted between the platters and interface?

This gives me two possible options it would seem;

1.  If encrypted on the platters - I would need to replace the mani drive PCB on the bottom, and the USB converter daughter board.  This may fix the power-up problem.  If I can get a set of boards from WD, or just buy another external drive and cannabalize the parts from another drive.  That assumes that the boards do the encryption algorithm and when I swap the boards the same algorithm is moved over, or that the encryption algorithm is done within the drive chassis itself.

2.  If not encrypted at the platter level - then I could have a clean room move the platters and do data recovery.  But the PCB boards would still be a much cheaper solution if I could get them…

Or is there any other options that would be simpler and cheaper to do?