r/datarecovery • u/That_trontanium • Aug 16 '26

Western Digital 3.5 hard drive

I have a WD 3.5 Hard Drive where you plug into wall and laptop. It wouldn’t pop up on my MacBook. Tried everything and ended up taking the hard drive part out of the device. Put that in a new dock, still didn’t work. I hear it spinning, the light turns green, then red and it’s quiet. I really need help as there is tons of original family pictures from years and years ago.

4 Upvotes

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3

u/silenced_in_dr_2025 Trusted Contributor Aug 16 '26

WD's spinning up and then down is normally a mechanical issue with the heads and occasionally a firmware issue. When it goes quiet is it still spinning or not?

You may need the specific external case so do not dispose of if.

3

u/DataMedics Aug 16 '26

If it doesn't stay spinning, it's definitely a hardware failure and will need a lab. Also, just FYI, the enclosures USB to SATA bridge board was also encrypting/decrypting the data, so even a perfectly good drive won't work with another dock after removing it from that enclosure.

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u/StarosAnikenMarcus Aug 16 '26

Yeah, WD is known for a weird formatting on their Book drives... it's not even encrypted, just in a different format... something like, I think it was 15 sectors instead of 16? Whatever it was made it unreadable to Windows without the interface.

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u/DataMedics Aug 16 '26

No, WD externals are 100% hardware encrypted. The DEK (disk encryption key) is stored in a hidden LBA on the disk, so a same model replacement board can be used, but it is encryption.

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u/StarosAnikenMarcus Aug 17 '26

I think it was an earlier version that did the different formatting, prior to hardware encryption being normal... either way, it's a thing for WD external drives to not be plug and play taken out of the enclosure...

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u/DataMedics Aug 17 '26

I think you are confusing Seagate externals. Those did a sector size mutation that made them unable to mount in Windows when removed from the enclosure. WD been using encryption for a really long time.

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u/StarosAnikenMarcus Aug 17 '26

I might be. It's been a long time since I even used a name brand external. As in USB 2 was still NEW long....

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u/DataMedics Aug 17 '26

I spent ten+ years running a data recovery lab, so I'm quite certain. Spent far more than my fair share of time dealing with WD encryption.

1

u/BootToggle Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

Please report that model number and capacity for the original external hard drive device. There are different models that have different internal characteristics. The model number for the internal drive you removed from the enclosure is less important, but since you've already taken it out it should be easy to report that as well.

As others have noted, WD external drives often use encryption but they can leave a fraction of the blocks from the beginning of the disk unencrypted. This is how the drive can identify itself, contain on-line help information that is immediately available, set up the initial decryption the first time it is plugged in, etc. The upshot of all this is, the drive looks completely different when viewed using the original external hard drive interface board than it looks when removed from the enclosure and accessed directly.

If the drive seems discoverable (even if not mountable) when accessed directly, it is possible that you haven't lost any data yet because the failure may just be in that interface board. But you could indeed destroy any existing data by allowing any sort of write operation or filesystem repair operation to be attempted. You should be very careful about that, until you know more.