Solved Help converting a WD MyBook Essentials external to an internal drive

[Ramyyemani]

Hello, I have a WD MyBook Essentials 2TB external hard drive that I would like to use as an internal drive(Direct SATA).

About five months ago I had trouble with the enclosure, when ever I plug it in it takes a long time to load and only appears as a local desk with no size or other information, although it appears to be a healthy primary partition in Disk Manager.

I googled around and found that it's very common for the USB3-SATA bridge to fail and that the data is most likely encrypted by the bridge.

I was able to recover some of the data using GetDataBack NTFS, then I took the drive out of the enclosure and connected it directly via a SATA-USB adapter, the computer recognized it but it was not initialized and unallocated, it prompted me to initialize it as ether MBR or GPT,I checked MBR and hit Ok then it gave this message:
Data error (cyclic redundancy check)

I tried TestDisk 7.0 but if didn't find any partitions.

I tried HP USB Disk Format Tool V2.1.8, the same error occurred.

I tried DMDE 3.0.6, it kept displaying this message:
LBA:xx xxx xxx (try x): WinEror 1(or 2 ). The system cannot find the file specified.
I clicked ignore all and finally got to this page and I don't know where to go from here:

As a last resort I'm planing to use HDDerase to remove everything from the drive, as it's very risky and I'm using a laptop and to make matters worse, the power is not exactly what you could call reliable around here so I'm hopping I can avoid that.

Thank you for your time.

 

[cyanna]

it is entirely possible the drive is gone but open a command prompt and type diskpart and hit enter. Then type list disk and hit enter. take a screen shot of the results and post back

 

[Megahertz07]

Open the MyBook Essentials case and find out what kind of HDD it has.
- If it's a HDD with a USB connector, there is nothing you can do.

- If it's a normal SATA HDD with a USB interface connected, you can try to unplug the interface and then connect the SATA HDD to a desktop.

 

[MightyMiroWD]

Hi Ramyyemani!

I am sorry to hear about the troubles you were having, I know this could be a pretty unpleasant experience...

It's hard to say what kind of drive you have inside the enclosure - it could be SATA or USB native and any model as well, like described in this KB article:
Support Answers

WD My Book Essentials is hardware encrypted and even if you manage to get some of your data it will be encrypted, so I'd suggest to contact a data recovery company and see if they will be able to get all the information back - here is a list you can check for a specific company if you want:
Support Answers

On the other hand, if you want to reformat the external, you can use our tool Data Lifeguard Diagnostics to write zeroes on the drive. Here's a link where you can download the software and a KB article with detailed guide on how to do so:
DLG - Support Answers
KB article - Support Answers

Hope this helps and best of luck!

 

[Ramyyemani]

The driver failed both SMART tests.

I find this very infuriating as the drive was handled very carefully, no one had access to it but me and it mostly sat at the corner of the desk and seldom moved.

For it to fail like that out of the blue, It's safe to assume we wont be using these products again.

Thank you for your time.