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Not initialized western digital external harddisk data recovery

R

Ram_Nagarajan

Junior Member
my western digital my passport ultra is currently inaccessible and it is being shown as "not initialized" in disk management. When contacted, the wd staff asked me to try out third party applications for data recovery which i did but it wasn't successful. I would really appreciate if i can have a solution for getting back the data from the harddisk
 
Ram_Nagarajan said:
my western digital my passport ultra is currently inaccessible and it is being shown as "not initialized" in disk management. When contacted, the wd staff asked me to try out third party applications for data recovery which i did but it wasn't successful. I would really appreciate if i can have a solution for getting back the data from the harddisk
Click to expand...

I see a lot of passports here for recovery. Here is a list of causes of the symptoms you are getting:

1. Media damage
2. Firmware damage
3. Head damage

The challenge is that these drives are USB only interfaces with the built in USB bridge encrypting your data on the fly, as it get stored to the platters.

Can you confirm that the drive is being detected in the management at its full capacity? If you are able to do anything at all, your first step should be to try and get a full sector-by-sector clone with a program like ddrescue that can handle bad sectors and log the errors.
 
Hey there 🙂

WD My Passport features hardware encryption and it would be really hard to get the data back ifthe drive has gone into a RAW format. Your safest way would be to contact a data recovery company so they can extract the data for you. Do have in mind that their services can be quite costly.
Some third-party tools may help, but each unsuccessful try lowers the chance for full data recovery.
Have you tried accessing the drive from another OS (other computers, Linux Live CD, etc.)?

Captain_WD.
 
RecoveryForce said:
I see a lot of passports here for recovery. Here is a list of causes of the symptoms you are getting:

1. Media damage
2. Firmware damage
3. Head damage

The challenge is that these drives are USB only interfaces with the built in USB bridge encrypting your data on the fly, as it get stored to the platters.

Can you confirm that the drive is being detected in the management at its full capacity? If you are able to do anything at all, your first step should be to try and get a full sector-by-sector clone with a program like ddrescue that can handle bad sectors and log the errors.
Click to expand...

hi, in the disk management all i can see is that the hdd is being shown as not initialized and is there any ddrescue like tool for windows or mac ?
 
Captain_WD said:
Hey there 🙂

WD My Passport features hardware encryption and it would be really hard to get the data back ifthe drive has gone into a RAW format. Your safest way would be to contact a data recovery company so they can extract the data for you. Do have in mind that their services can be quite costly.
Some third-party tools may help, but each unsuccessful try lowers the chance for full data recovery.
Have you tried accessing the drive from another OS (other computers, Linux Live CD, etc.)?

Captain_WD.
Click to expand...

hi captain_WD

once the issue occurred i tried using different cable and also in different os, currently i'm using win 7, i tried in win 8 and also in mac. i tried some third - party tools which couldnt even recognize the file, any suggestions ?
 
OP, you didn't tell us what recovery software you tried.
Normally, people should always clone the drive, but, since this is one of those self-encrypting USB drives, that means your only real option is to send it out to a recovery place, and hope they can do something with it.
(Well, if windows does see the drive, and you don't want to spend big $$$ on a recovery service, then I would use testdisk as a last resort, and let it scan the drive and see if it can recover the partition tables. Do note that if the drive has head damage, this won't work, and could make things worse.)

While this won't help you now, for the next time, you should keep data on multiple drives, and you won't get into this kind of situation where you need to pay some big $$$ to get the data back.

Good luck!
 
Ram_Nagarajan said:
~snip~
Click to expand...

As Elixer pointed out, cloning a failed external drive is a good option, but due to the hardware encryption of the drive this won't be of much use as you'd be able to fully copy the data but you won't be able to read it properly (it will still be encrypted).
Sadly, I'd say you are left with the data recovery company as a last resort to get your data. I'd suggest to use on of the WD partners as they have full access to the encryption codes of the drives for faster and easier data recovery: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=lbYJa9

Captain_WD.
 
This is a WD Passport with a USB only interface (I assume). Unless the drive is prompting for a password, there is no encryption issues for the OP, should they want to clone the drive. If they were to move the ROM to a SATA PCB and then try to access the drive, bypassing the USB bridge, they would then be reading the drive in an encrypted format that requires another step for decryption.
 
RecoveryForce said:
This is a WD Passport with a USB only interface (I assume). Unless the drive is prompting for a password, there is no encryption issues for the OP, should they want to clone the drive. If they were to move the ROM to a SATA PCB and then try to access the drive, bypassing the USB bridge, they would then be reading the drive in an encrypted format that requires another step for decryption.
Click to expand...

Oh, I thought it was a auto-encrypting passport, not the ones where they require a password.
 
Elixer said:
Oh, I thought it was a auto-encrypting passport, not the ones where they require a password.
Click to expand...
Not sure what you mean there. The data is automatically encrypted when written to the platters, but is decrypted by the built-in USB bridge. So, unless there is a password set on the drive, the drive should appear as unencrypted when connected to a system via the USB connection.

That said, the drive likely has physical issues that are the source of their grief. Their only chance is if they can mirror the drive, but I suspect that the drive needs some repair first.
 
Ram_Nagarajan said:
my western digital my passport ultra is currently inaccessible and it is being shown as "not initialized" in disk management. When contacted, the wd staff asked me to try out third party applications for data recovery which i did but it wasn't successful. I would really appreciate if i can have a solution for getting back the data from the harddisk
Click to expand...
does the data have any value? What is it worth to you to recover the data?
 
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