A WD My Passport showing as RAW on a Mac. The file system was corrupt — but the reason the usual tricks all failed is that the drive was encrypted, and the key was not on the drive.
← All case files · £300 + VAT, flat
The drive appeared as RAW rather than as a mounted volume. Finder could not see it, Disk Utility could not repair it, and the IT department that looked at it first concluded — correctly — that the drive was encrypted and gave up. It held years of accumulated documents and personal files, with no backup.
Almost every modern WD external — My Passport, My Book, Elements to varying degrees — encrypts everything written to it in hardware, on the USB bridge board. This happens whether or not you ever set a password, whether or not you installed WD Security, whether or not you knew about it. It is on by default and it cannot be turned off.
The consequence is the single most expensive misconception in external drive recovery: if you crack the case open and connect the bare drive to a SATA port, you get nothing. Not a corrupted file system — noise. The unique key lives in the bridge chip, and without that specific board, the platters are a very heavy random number generator.
This is exactly why an external drive must be posted to us whole, in its enclosure. The one thing that makes it unrecoverable is separating it from its own bridge board and then losing, breaking or binning that board.
, which is why it presented as RAW.
, and the original bridge board was — crucially — still with the drive.
The volume was rebuilt from the decrypted image and the documents came back with their original folder structure intact.
This one was recoverable because the bridge board survived. The honest limit is worth stating plainly: if the bridge board is destroyed and you set a WD Security password you no longer remember, that data is gone. Not expensive — gone. There is no laboratory anywhere that can help you, and any firm that tells you otherwise is lying.
Send the whole enclosure. Do not open it, and do not throw any part of it away.
We ask people to remove the drive from a laptop or a desktop before posting it, because sending an entire machine is expensive and pointless. External drives are the exception, and this is why. The enclosure is not packaging — the board inside it is holding the only copy of your encryption key.
If someone has already opened it, keep every piece. That small green board is the difference between a routine recovery and a permanent loss.
Drop the drive at our Quayside reception, or post it to us — it costs nothing to find out what happened. You get a written figure from the fixed bands before any work begins.