Western Digital enclosure, no partition found

Bob565656 said:

My friend has a WD enclosure. The USB plug on it has desoldered and ripped off of the PCB. I attempted to remove the drive and swap it into another aftermarket enclosure but I can no longer see the partition on the WD harddrive. I figure WD is using some kind of HW/SW encryption. Would I be able to buy another enclosure and swap the drives out to recover this lost data? If not, can I recover this data fully?

Thanks.

Hi there
Was this a powered HDD. If this is the case then you can simply remove the entire HDD out of the case and install it as an INTERNAL HDD -- connect the SATA to the SATA connector on the MOBO and the SATA power connector to a SATA power connector on the MOBO (the longer one).

If the HDD only has a "Standard" IDE power connector (the 4 Pin one) then just plug that one in to an IDE power connector on the MOBO -- the drive will still work as SATA so long as it has a SATA DATA connector (the shorter one of the two sets of pins).

If the device doesn't have a separate power supply then a simple SATA==>USB connector will suffice -- and simply connect your device via the SATA==>USB connector to a USB slot on the computer.

If you STILL want to use the HDD as an EXTERNAL drive then if you need external power just use a standard SATA to USB Powered disk enclosure.

If the device > 2 TB originally you'll need to set it up as a GPT disk -- in any case after connecting to computer just go into control panel ==>administrative tools==> computer management==>Disk management and see what Windows shows you.

Even before that does the BIOS indicate the relevant disk --the BIOS should these days be able to identify USB disks at boot time.

Cheers
jimbo

Jimbo, I know how to install a hard drive into an external enclosure. I don't believe you've understood what my problem is