Best approach to restore or recover 4TB WD My Book external HDD?

One of my main backup drives went south last week, now appearing uninitialized to Win10 and Win7. It contains mostly personal records - largely PDFs, some Excel/Word, Windows ISOs, and proprietary format files from other software - the kinds of things that in the past I've found pretty much impossible to recover using amateur-friendly data recovery software. No pictures or videos. So I'm hoping the partition and file table can be recovered.

I had bought a couple of short USB 3.0 extender cables to make reaching the back ports on my desktop easier, and both were crap. With one, the 4TB My Book, would rapidly connect/disconnect. I stopped it quickly when I heard the chiming, as far as I recall, by yanking either the cable or drive PSU. With a handful of thumb drives, and another portable HDD, the cables either didn't recognize them at all, or ran at only USB 2.0, so I'm convinced the HDD issue was not pre-existing but was caused by one of the cables.

Now the drive is seen as a USB device but unreadable by Windows, and prompts the "initialize" pop-up window in W10 or W7 disk management. The WD drive utility says the SMART data is fine, and their short test comes back a pass. I haven't tried anything else yet. I believe I had just used the drive as it came new, but I can't be sure I didn't reformat or re-initialize it.

As it is a backup drive, many of the files are found on other computers, but not all, as not all files had yet been mirrored back to other locations during recent refresh/upgrade activity.

Any advice for how to proceed? Are there any tools worth trying for repairing the volume/partition? When I lunched the file tables on a couple of drives 6 years ago, I bought Easeus Data Recovery Wizard Pro 9.5, but I am hoping there's some path to file table restoration, rather than individual file recovery. I don't know how all this works, but at the time I found individual file recovery to work really well for JPGs, passably well for PDFs (AFAIR), and not much at all for Excel/Word, and even worse for the rest. Recovering all the PDFs in this case would be a major success, but there is a lot of other stuff I'll miss.

I read the recent thread about the dropped 8TB My Book, and disappointed to learn that the WD My Book contents are encrypted. I was set to try shucking the drive to see if that solved or improved the problem.

ETA: I see that this drive was a warranty replacement for another, in August 2018, and was re-certified in Vietnam. So I bought new, and they sent me a refurb as a warranty replacement ....

If have a 6TB WD My Book (Model WDBBGB0060HBK-NESN). It comes with encryption software but that is optional to use. I have never used it so my drive is not encrypted. It comes formatted exFAT. For the My Book it has the WD Drive Utilities.

I didn't use their encryption, beyond the apparently inherent encryption of their USB 3 interface circuitry, and the WD Drive Utility says the SMART values are fine, and the drive passes their quick test. I've been analyzing it for the last 11 hours or so with the Easeus Partition Recovery module, and that found only two tiny partitions (the drive was not partitioned at least in a way that was visible to Windows Explorer or Disk Management), and is now doing what it calls a sector search.

I don't plan to do any actual partition or file recovery attempts on this bad drive for the moment, I've been creating another backup drive from the primary file copies on my computers, and contemplating how to proceed with this bad one.

jumanji said:

Hi @spoolin01

1. The micro-B connector on your WD External may not be a standard Micro-B connection. So use the same cable that came with your WD external drive.

2. Please read the label on your WDexternal and furnish the exact model number of your refurbished WD external drive. That will enable me to check its specs.

3. Do you know whether it came as an MBR drive or GPT drive? Whether it was NTFS or ExFat?

4. Post a screenshot of Windows Disk Management with only your faulty WD external plugged-in. ( To avoid clutter and be focussed, remove all other USB connected storage devices). Follow the guidelines here for the WDM screenshot ( hide Console Tree, Action Pane, adjust seperators as ordained in it)
How to Post a Screenshot of Disk Management

5. Let us ascertain the health of your WD external the easy way. Download, install, and run the trial version of Hard Disk Sentinel , select your external HDD and post the screenshot showing its health status.

<snip>
In data recovery there is no "one size fits all" And WD externals are always a PITA because of the many ways in which WD had manipulated its drives - propreitary cables, uncalled for self-encryption. ( only their data recovery partners have the key to decrypt - reason why they offer free data recovery during the warranty period and then paid recovery by their data recovery partners at huge cost.)

I may need to investigate further to assess the situation in your case. ( When you sleep, I am awake and when I am awake you are asleep. So allow for the time lag.)

Hello jumanji, thank you for the help.

1) I have a half dozen or so USB 3 drives (WD, SG, and Toshiba) that I cycle through for various storage and backup use, that all use the 9-pin micro-B cable. I tend to use the same one or two cables for all the drives. I don't know that I've ever seen one that's branded, and at this point I'm not able to determine which cable came with which drive. The currently associated cable worked with this 4TB WD drive several times in the week or two prior to this mishap.

2) The P/N for the drive is WDBBGB0040HBK-NA.

3) I never took note whether is was GPT or MBR, or which filesystem was used. Prior to running Partition Master, the disk was seen as uninitialized, now there are two unallocated MBR spaces. I had thought the PM scan was not intrusive, but I guess that's not the case.

4) Not sure why there are now two unallocated spaces, it wasn't like that before I ran the Partition Master scan.


5)

Thank you for your continued efforts. If restoration of the GPT table isn't in the cards, I'll probably attempt amateur file recovery.

I keep reading how GPT was improved by a second distally located file table copy. I thought that was to improve recoverability. Does it ever work that way?