Backing up data, need to recover partition

Greetings everyone,

I'm having quite a bit of bad luck at backing up data from a WD My Book Essential. I had a feeling something was faulty, so I started backing up my data. The hard disk in it was 1TB, and lets say about 450 GB of it was used.

I started copying everything, and about 50% went smoothly. Normal speed, no hickups. Then the drive started randomly dying and rebooting. It would copy for a number of minutes, then stopped as if the drive had been unplugged, and then poped up again after a few seconds. After a while, I just couldn't access it anymore. I had a feeling something might be wrong with the case.

So I disassembled it, and took the hard drive out. I plugged it into my computer, and it's recognized, but the capacity of it is showing up as unallocated in Computer Management.



Disk 0 is my main hard disk, split into two partitions, and Disk 1 is the drive in questions.

Right now I'm running TestDisk and it will take till morning to analyse all 121600 cylinders. I'm wondering what my next step(s) should be if the scan comes up empty? Should I try to use any other software to recover the partition, or should I use something to try to recover the files?

Thank you in advance for any tips and ideas.

That's normal and expected behavior when you pull external hard disks out of their enclosure.
Most HDs are actually hardware-encrypted, with the decryption keys living in the circuit board of the enclosure and so, by removing the disk itself, you effectively bypass that and ending up reading the raw encrypted contents.

Solution is simple, just put the drive back in the enclosure and there copy the data, being as patient as it needs.

Look here for some references:
Are all WD MyBook Essentials hardware encrypted? - Storage

- Ditto -

NOT using hardware encryption on "My Book Essential" - External Drives for PC - WD Community

In your case, the HDD inside seems to be failing fast and may be it is already done..

By taking the HDD outside you have made any data recovery almost next to impossible. For even if you manage to recover some more data than what you have already recovered ( whilst the HDD was inside the enclosure with automatic decryption enabled by the chip in the enclosure electronics) it will be the encrypted data and useless.