The Glade 4.0

Well folks, I'm hoping one of you may be able to help me out here...I've hit the end of my minimal knowledge for this problem.

Awhile back I bought a WesternDigital MyBook Elite 1GB external harddrive. It worked great but after about 6 months, the USB connection on the case began to loosen up and would frequently disconnect from the computer. I did some research and found out many others had this issue with same unit, as WD used a shitty method to secure the port on the circuit board. I frankenstein'd a solution with some tape and glue with the USB cord but eventually it broke, and the unit was useless. So I cracked the case open and removed the harddrive because it has some stuff on it I would like to keep. The hdd is a WD Green SATA model.

I also liked the idea of having one of my drives as portable, due to all the traveling I do, so I purchased THIS external case. Yesterday I installed the drive into the case and plugged it into my desktop. The computer recognized it (systray icon of USB mass storage popped up) but nothing was showing in My Computer or Explorer. I figured this seems similar to a past problem I had, so I snagged a copy of Partition Table Doctor from a friend and tried to rebuild the partition tables. That did not work, so I tried a second problem called EaseUS that worked for me in the past. Again no dice, both programs see the drive but they act as if no info is on it. I'll post some screens of disk manager, PTD and EaseUS so you can see. I've run full scans on both that took forever but still no luck. Also tried plugging it into my laptop but the same issue.

I'm really not sure what might have happened here. Could the drive have become corrupted after we pulled it from the original case? It worked fine before the original case broke, on both my laptop and my desktop. Both are running Vista. I really have no idea what happened here. Any help is much appreciated!

Here are some screens of what the programs are reading in regards to the drive:

EDIT: sorry the screens arent as good of quality when they uploaded. Let me know if you want something clearer.

It looks like you've got an ext3 file system on that drive. You're probably going to need to read that using Linux. Unless there's some Windows utility that will give you the ability to mount it.

_________________

Actually, I think you're going to need a LiveCD of some sort ...

You can install drivers and applications that give you read support, but very few with any write support or actual ability to manipulate the data on the partition.

http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html

Ext2 IFS for Windows, linked above, will allow you to mount ext3 partitions in ext2 mode, but you'd lose journaling support; and, I'm not entirely sure how well it will work under Vista or Win 7.

_________________

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the MyBook series uses an encryption chip on the enclosure's PCB to encrypt/decrypt data to/from the internal disk (which is just an ordinary off-the-shelf disk by itself). I don't know if they've ever specifically said what encryption algo they use, but it's definitely 256-bit. So, likely AES-256.

There is no ext3 partition on your disk -- that's just your partitioning/recovery software trying to make sense of the seemingly random gibberish where your partition table should be.

Basically, if you want to be able to get your data off the disk you need either:

1. The original enclosure (each has a unique encryption key, so it has to be YOUR MyBook enclosure)
2. A quantum computer.

Your best bet is just to get the USB connector re-soldered to the enclosure's PCB. USB connectors are large, non-delicate components, so this should be an easy repair for anyone halfway competent at PCB soldering. TV/stereo/appliance repair shops might be able to do this. Also custom audio/cables/electronics shops. You could even try it yourself. My manual dexterity is piss-poor, so I don't even attempt soldering if PCBs are involved, but YMMV.

If the connector is truly beyond repair (or the PCB is damaged), the only remaining option would be to swap the encryption chip from your enclosure into a second enclosure of the same model (maybe just same series?). (De)soldering ICs is definitely a task best left to the professionals, though.

See also:
http://carltonbale.com/western-digital-mybook-drive-lock-encryption-failure-and-recovery

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

When I was researching the problem I read up on that encryption, but it was always listed as optional. I never installed the WD MyWare software that came with the drive, and I never (knowingly) enabled the hardware encryption. You still think that could be the issue? I did keep the original case and all the parts, I'm pretty sure. The USB port is pretty tiny, and I've never soldered before but I guess I may be able to give it a shot.

I'm not sure that partitioning software would just randomly choose a file system type to display if it couldn't actually identify it (although certainly stranger things have happened). I'd give a LiveCD a shot prior to taking a soldering iron to anything. It just takes downloading an .iso and burning to a CD. If it can identify and read the drive, then you just need to copy everything off to a usb stick, and then you can reformat the drive as NTFS so Windows can read it, and transfer everything back. Alternately, you could just keep the usb stick.

_________________

I haven't tried these suggestions yet, but I did take the drive outta the enclosure and plug it into my desktop directly, after removing my other SATA storage drive. Here's how its listed under disk manager. I tried to assign a drive letter to it but that option is greyed out. I also tried EaseUS Partition Recovery on it and it said "there are no partitions on this disk".

EDIT: OK I didn't realize what exactly a LiveCD was. I actually have a Knoppix CD I keep around and booted up using that, both with the drive in the enclosure, and connected directly to the desktop. Both times I was unable to read the drive while in Knoppix. I don't recall the exact error message while using the enclosure, but I just wrote down the error while trying to access it plugged into the desktop:



Maybe Stathol is right and this is the bullshit encryption taking effect? Arghh so frustrating.

Well, I can tell you from personal experience what a MyBook partition table should look like. I've actually had reason to dick around with one's partition table last week (don't ask). They have a single type 0x07 (HPFS/NTFS) partition starting at CHS 1/0/0 and ending on the last CHS. The partition is pre-formatted with an NTFS filesystem.

The partition table your tools are showing isn't even sane. The secondary partition that supposedly contains the ext3 filesystem starts 100+GB into the disk, and extends beyond both the containing primary partition and the end of the drive itself. You can also tell from the garbled filesystem label that there is no ext3 superblock at that position (well, it's very unlikely, anyway). Probably a random value of 0x83 just happened to fall at offset 0x04 of one of the 16 partition records. A naive tool will just say "ooh, a partition!" even if everything else in the record is completely nuts.

This guy's blog did a pretty good reverse engineering of the MyBook Essential/Elite encryption system. Suffice to say, the encryption is always on, even if you haven't specifically enabled it or set a password. When you "enable" the encryption with SmartWare, what probably happens is that it encrypts the decryption key(s) using your password so that they can't be automatically decrypted anymore without the password.

The exact details of the encryption system are known only to HP, so we can really only guess at the exact mechanism. They're certainly doing something odd with sector 1 (this should normally be zero-filled), but it isn't clear what. I'd be curious to know what this looks like both in and out of the enclosure when a password has been set. I'd also like to see sectors 2-63. These are also normally unused and should be zero-filled, although some boot loaders will make use of 1-63.

In any case, it's clear from his analysis that both the disk contents and the MBR/partition table are indeed encrypted out-of-the-box and without the user having enabled it/set a password. I wish I had better news, but the bottom line is that you need the USB-to-SATA bridge IC from the enclosure in order to decrypt the disk contents. If you still have any doubts, do a dump of sectors 0-63 and post it here (or at least sector 0). It should be really obvious if the MBR is encrypted. I know this can be done with HxD, and probably other free tools as well.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Well, fortunately I saved the original case, and I'm pretty certain the USB port. I don't think there would be anywhere in town that can do electronic repairs, I'll poke around a bit though.

I'll post some pics of the USB port and the circuit board where its broken off from. IIRC it looked like a real pain in the *** to resolder.

Thanks for your help so far Stathol and others! It's to bad this has been such a horrible experience, I'm usually a big fan of WD products.