A WD My Passport coming up RAW on a Mac. The file system was indeed corrupt — but every routine fix failed for a separate reason: the drive was encrypted, and its key had never lived on the drive.
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Connected to the Mac, the drive showed up RAW rather than mounting. Finder wouldn’t display it, Disk Utility wouldn’t mend it, and the firm’s own IT staff had already landed on the right answer — it was encrypted — and stopped there. Behind that lock lay years of documents and personal files, none of them backed up.
Nearly every WD external sold today — My Passport and My Book above all, Elements to a smaller extent — encrypts everything written to it in hardware, right on the USB bridge board. It does so whether or not you ever set a password, installed WD Security, or even realised the feature was there. It arrives switched on, and there’s no way to switch it off.
Which brings us to the priciest error people make with these drives: crack the shell open, hook the bare disk to a SATA port, and you get nothing you can use — not a corrupt file system, just noise. That one-of-a-kind key sits inside the bridge chip, so without that precise board the platters are little more than a very heavy random-number generator.
That’s exactly why an external drive needs to arrive with us whole, still inside its enclosure. The surest route to making one permanently unreadable is to part it from its own bridge board and then mislay, break or throw that board out.
which is what made it come up RAW.
and, above all, the drive still had its original bridge board attached.
Because the bridge was in good order, there was no need to defeat the encryption at all — we imaged the drive straight through its own bridge, letting the board decode the data on the way out just as it does in everyday use, and took a clean, decrypted image. From that image the corrupt file system was rebuilt and the volume made readable once more. The disk itself was only ever read, never written to.
From the decrypted image the volume was pieced back together, and the documents came back with their folders precisely as they had been.
It came back solely because the bridge board had survived — and the limit here deserves stating without any sugar-coating: if that board is destroyed and you’ve set a WD Security password you can no longer bring to mind, the data is gone. Not dear to recover — gone. No laboratory anywhere can get it back, and anyone who says otherwise is lying to you.
Post the enclosure entire. Don’t open it, and don’t throw any part of it away.
We tell people to pull the drive from a laptop or desktop before posting, since sending a whole machine is expensive and needless. External drives are the single exception, and this is precisely why. The enclosure isn’t packaging — the board inside holds the only copy of your key.
If it’s already been opened, hold on to every last piece. That small green board is the entire difference between a routine recovery and losing the lot.
Bring the drive to our Guildford Business Park reception, or post it over — it costs nothing to learn what went wrong. You’ll have a written figure from the fixed bands before any work begins.