A My Passport external hard drive that would not show up was removed from its case and connected to the computer via a SATA cable. It is entirely reasonable to believe you can take a bare drive and plug it into any computer. This isn't true here, and by then the part of the enclosure that had the decryption key was long gone with the box.
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This is a scenario, not a case study. It illustrates a common failure type that we address on a regular basis, and how it is approached, written from the technical side (versus as part of a single customer project). Please visit our documented case files here.
A user's external hard drive stops being detected. One of the first things one will find when searching online is to open the casing of the external drive and pull the bare drive out and attach it to a SATA connector on your computer. In some cases this works fine, but several of the most common enclosures produce a raw disk that Windows says is unformatted. Once Windows sees this raw disk, Windows will ask if you want to initialise it.
There are several companies that use hardware encryption located at the USB bridge rather than in the drive. This means that all data that is passed to or from the disk passes through the USB bridge. Data passing to the disk is encrypted before going to the disk. Data coming from the disk is decrypted before it comes out of the USB bridge. Because this process takes place invisibly, and does not require any input from users, most users do not realise this process exists.
When a company creates their own USB bridge, they install the decryption key onto that board. They don't install the key onto the disk. The key is not generated from any user-defined passwords. The key is also not installed anywhere else in the system. Therefore, when a user removes the bare disk from the USB bridge, there is no longer any mechanism for decrypting anything stored on that bare disk.
WD My Passport and My Book are the most common places for this to catch users. Generally speaking, WD Elements do not encrypt (this is why recommendations that look exactly the same work for one and break access for the other).
Because most modern My Passport and My Book units use hardware encryption with the encryption key stored on the USB bridge board instead of the disk. Once removed from the case, the disks will contain ciphertext with nothing on them able to read it.
Not always; however, it is a lot more difficult. We will need to identify a compatible bridge from the same family and revision. Such a bridge may be impossible to obtain. If you can find your case somewhere, get it back.
No. Declining was what saved this job; accepting would have caused a write of a new partition layout over the encrypted volume, damaging a healthy, unblemished hard drive, and added another avoidable problem to the previous one.
Yes. These units are encrypted by default. It’s just that when you set a password, you’re adding authentication on top rather than turning the encryption on. A great many owners don’t even know their drives are encrypted.
The bridge board fails at least as much as the disk does. So, a dead external drive frequently equates to a perfectly fine disk but a failed interface: good news, and good news only if you still have the interface available.
Everything (drive, enclosure, board) along with the cable and power supply if there is one. It doesn’t matter how beat up the box may look or how irrelevant it seems; send it. The WD units use it to decrypt every file.
If the drive came with software that gave you password protection, it almost certainly has an encrypting bridge whether or not you set a password. On many models, the encryption happens via hardware anyway; entering your password simply gives you access to the decryption key.
The practical rule is easier to follow: do not remove the outer casing from an external hard drive which may be needed for recovery at some time. Removing it gives no advantage in a failure event, and on the drive ranges where this does matter there is no way to undo what has been done.
If the outer casing has already failed and the drive inside is healthy, then that is exactly the situation that laboratories deal with routinely, as long as the board was included.