WD data recovery — Passports, colours & the encryption twist.

If you remove a My Passport’s cover plate, you will find an unremarkable WD hard disk inside. However, many My Passport models (whether or not you used a password) will write anything you create to the hard disk after passing that information through a chip dedicated to encrypting your data on the hard disk at the level of the USB interface. There are a couple of things you should know about the My Passport before anyone decides to start removing screws. The drive can be removed from its case (the original case) and placed in a generic caddy; however, with a generic chip on the USB bridge, the drive will simply read as ‘noise’ since the generic chip does not possess the required cryptographic keys. Remove the original case and dispose of it and you’ve disposed of one of the components the recovery may depend on. In addition, using the ‘free-software’ method for recovery also hits a brick wall of ciphertext. This does not mean that your data cannot be recovered (recovering WD’s bridge encrypted data has been extensively tested in laboratory settings); however, this creates an entirely new scenario for the typical “DIY” recovery: keep every piece together, change nothing, and mention ‘My Passport’ early when you get in touch, because it shapes the whole plan. When working on recovering a My Passport model where you actually entered a password during initial configuration, that password becomes part of the recovery process. Have it available.

The internal drives (Blue and Black) suffer normal failures (worn-out, bad heads, occasional power spike) and can be fixed using standard techniques. Reds are generally found in a RAID environment as part of a larger NAS system, and you will need an array recovery of the entire RAID system. Since the data is spread across multiple disks, the goal should be to get an image of each and then try to rebuild the RAID using the images. Purples have unique file structures created by CCTV recorders which make them difficult to extract data from. As such, once you recover the actual disk(s), you’ll also need to parse the DVR’s file structure. Finally, there are the Elements and easystore external backup units. Like the Passport, these units tend to die at the ‘bridge’, and since they’re usually not encrypted, this leaves you with a dead unit and a potentially good drive inside. Therefore, when we say “dead”, we really mean the board died while leaving the drive itself in working order. In addition to these physical failures, WD uses a common firmware architecture throughout many of their product lines (the service modules). This firmware architecture is known to cause slow performance and response time issues with some of their products, which is thoroughly charted ground for platform-level diagnostic software and hardware.

First things first: we do a free diagnostic on all of our customers’ storage devices. When it comes to external devices, this means getting down to the root of whether or not the device is failing due to a problem with the enclosure or if it’s actually the drive inside. From there, we’ll move into performing repairs at the circuit-board level, making sure that the drive’s original calibration remains intact when repairing electronic problems, perform head work to correct mechanical failure related issues, provide firmware repair options for those who require it for specific product line failures, repair the bridge and decrypt any Passports or My Books that require it, and finally take one careful step through imaging and extracting data from the resulting image. We’ll give you a firm written price quote prior to starting any chargeable work. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data, similar to how our whole hard-drive bench operates, except that WD’s unique lockouts have been pre-accounted for.