Help recovering data from WD My Book [WDBBGB0080HBK-NA]

Well, my WD My Book (which I had for over 6 years I think) died and now I'm trying to recover the data inside it.

WD Drive Utilities reported SMART failed.

Tried to follow on the advice on Best approach to restore or recover 4TB WD My Book external HDD? but couldn't really work...
Can't remember if it was exFAT or NTFS or MBR or GPT....
Win 11 Disk Management showed as MBR and unallocated and I am unable to initialize it
Hard Disk Sentinel Trial came up as blank
Bootice stopped scanning almost immediately (stopped at sector 16 I think)

Tried this advice using Stellar Data Recovery and it couldn't find the files after 6-8 hours of scanning.

Running Minitool Partition Wizard...nothing coming out on preview....think I'll stop the scan as it seems hopeless

So I assume I would need to go to a WD Data Recovery shop to get the data out because of the hardware encryption?

Tinkering and tampering (i.e. experimenting) using 3rd party software can only cause greater problems, and often result in loss of recoverable data.

When using the web to search for solutions, all that glitters is not necessarily gold. Some so-called fixes are pure commercially-oriented snake oil, and which options to use can vary from situation to situation (of which the advice on the web can be completely ignorant and offer (dangerous) generic solutions).

If you are new to this, then it might be a better idea to seek personal advice and/or assistance. However, advice given in forums such as this one is usually based on cold hard personal experience, much better preferred than generic web searches.

@jumanji <---- our data recovery expert.

hemholtz said:

Well, my WD My Book (which I had for over 6 years I think) died and now I'm trying to recover the data inside it.............................................So I assume I would need to go to a WD Data Recovery shop to get the data out because of the hardware encryption?

Absolutely. I suspect that the SATA to USB interface bridge circuit has failed. You already know that bridge circuit also contains a hardware encrypt/ decrypt chip and it encrypts the data written into the HDD. Even if the HDD inside is good, you will not be able to get your data by direct connection. Contact WD tech support to ascertain whether their data recovery partners can recover the data and the cost.

The common theme in both these ancient you tube videos is that they changed the controller card with the same part number.The Op's My book is over 6 years old . Today if he goes and buys the same WD My Book [WDBBGB0080HBK-NA], sure he will not get a controller card with the same part number. Controller card with a different part number will have a different embedded decrypt key and will not decrypt the Op's failed disk. If only the OP had bought two of the same disk when he purchased then both the controller cards will have the same part number and he could swap and get the data out. Today after 6 years it is not possible. Every batch produced by WD has a different decrypt key and different part number of the controller card. And only the WD data recovery partners know the keys of the different part number controller cards, can feed the relevant key to decypt and get the data out. . That is what I have read a decade back.