A My Passport that stopped being detected, opened up on the reasonable assumption that a bare drive would be easier to read. It was not — and the moment Windows offered to initialise it, the situation got considerably worse.
← All case files · £300 + VAT, flat
A researcher’s My Passport stopped appearing on any machine. Following advice found online, she opened the enclosure, removed the 2.5-inch drive inside and connected it directly through a SATA adapter.
Windows saw a disk of the correct size, reported it as uninitialised, and offered to initialise it. She accepted. On the drive were four years of field data and interview recordings.
no bad sectors of consequence, no noise, full capacity — it had never been the problem.
as it is by default on these units. The AES key lives on the USB bridge board, so the raw disk is meaningless without it, which is why it presented as uninitialised.
accepting the initialise prompt wrote a GPT over the start of the encrypted volume — small, but in exactly the wrong place.
This is the trap with WD externals specifically. The disk is not damaged and not blank; it is encrypted by a board that was left behind in the case. Every symptom points at a dead drive, and the intuitive next step makes it worse.
The original bridge board came in with the drive, which made this possible — without it there would have been no route at all. The disk was imaged read-only first, preserving the state including the wrongly written partition table.
The bridge was then examined and its key material recovered, allowing the image to be decrypted to plaintext. From there the original partition structure was rebuilt from what survived beneath the new GPT, and the NTFS volume mounted from the corrected image.
About 93%. The loss was entirely attributable to the initialise: the new partition table had been written over the beginning of the volume, taking part of the file system metadata with it, and some early directory structures could not be fully rebuilt.
Field data and every interview recording were recovered. Files affected by the overwritten region were reported by name.
Do not shuck a WD external. On most modern My Passport and My Book units, hardware encryption is enabled by default whether or not you ever set a password, and the key sits on the bridge board rather than the disk — so a bare drive reads as unformatted even when it is flawless.
And whatever the drive, never accept an offer to initialise. That writes a fresh partition table over the very structures a recovery would use. Send external units complete, with the enclosure and its board. Single externals from £300 +VAT.
Bring the drive to our Oxford Science 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.