Many Western Digital external hard disk drives have one brand specific fact to impact recoveries: they may silently encrypt every bit of information in hardware. Below is the WD colour family, the My Passport Encryption Story, and how WD recovery works from our bench.
The USB interface encrypts all data in hardware for many My Passport & My Book models. If you damage or kill the bridge you don’t just lose access to the drive; you also lose access to decrypting your files. This is a barrier to recovery if you can’t use specialised tools, but isn’t an absolute barrier.
Open a My Passport drive and you will find a standard issue WD drive. But on many models, everything written to it has passed through an encrypting chip at the USB bridge first. Whether you have entered a password or not. Before anything is done with your drive, there are some things you should know. Shuck your drive into a generic enclosure and it reads as gibberish because the new bridge doesn’t have the keys to unlock it. Lose or bin the original enclosure and you have discarded a part of your device that matters. And using freeware to try to get back what you put onto the drive dead-ends at the ciphertext. This doesn’t mean the data on your drive is unreachable: handling WD’s use of encryption on their USB bridge is established lab work. But it does change how you plan your DIY recovery: keep everything together, change nothing, and say ‘My Passport’ early when contacting us, because it shapes the plan. If you’ve set a password on a newer model, have your passphrase ready.
Internals (Blue, Black) are members of the internal family and suffer like all internal drives (failure due to wear, bad heads, occasional surges killing the board) but they respond to the universal solution. Reds show up in NAS scenarios, generally one member of a RAID set. The main task is the array recovery and the main discipline is getting images off each member of the RAID. Purples typically show up in the form of a closed system such as those used in surveillance applications (CCTV). These are generally enclosures with some form of proprietary file system layering over their native format. Recovering the drive itself will be half of the problem; figuring out how to parse the DVR’s format will be the other. And then there are the Elements/easystore external drives. They have the same bridge failure issue as the Passport, however they do not (generally) use encryption: a ‘dead’ unit often has a healthy drive inside behind a failed board. There are WD-specific elements to both the service modules and some of the firmwares (e.g., slow responding states on certain families) that make this area well-mapped for platform-level utilities.
First, free diagnostics, which include dealing with the enclosure on externals, and doing so properly rather than tearing into it at home with a screwdriver. Second, we’ll perform board level repairs to your drive preserving the drive’s own calibration where applicable. Third, when mechanical issues were present, we’ll perform head work on the bench. Fourth, when necessary, we’ll address firmware issues specific to WD products. Fifth, we’ll provide support for unlocking encrypted bridges in cases where you’ve got a Passport or My Book. Sixth, we’ll create a single pass image of your data, and recover your files from that image. We’re going to give you a fixed price written quote prior to performing any billable tasks. In addition, in most cases you only pay if we recover your data, which is the same promise as our whole hard-drive bench.
The fact that many My Passport and My Book units are encrypted in hardware by means of the USB bridge board inside the unit’s enclosure (even when you do not choose a password) is why the “dead” bridge is required to be used during the recovery process. In order to decrypt, the correct key(s) and tool(s) need to be applied, this is standard for a laboratory but a brick wall for typical DIY. Takeaway from experience: include everything attached to a dead WD external, including enclosure.
Workload codes. Blue: general use desktop. Black: high-performance. Red: used for NAS duty (designed for continuous operation within an array). Purple: surveillance video recording. Gold: enterprise. When recovering, usually the colour will give us the history of how the drive was used (i.e., a Red that came from a NAS would likely arrive with its array context, a Purple will come with an odd DVR file system) so we can adapt our bench method accordingly.
WD’s Dashboard provides a good way to get a snapshot of a quiet, healthy drive’s health using SMART numbers written in clear language. If the drive is not behaving well, follow the same rules that apply to every manufacturer: don’t run the long test; avoid running the ‘repair’ option; and never initialise a drive that asks you to do so. Any diagnostics that write to a failing mechanism or stress out a failing component will result in lost data.
A complimentary 48-hour diagnostic that includes all components of the enclosure. Written quote provided prior to any work; in most cases you only pay if we recover your data.