A My Passport that stopped being detected, opened up on the entirely reasonable assumption that a bare drive reads on any machine. It did not — and by then the part that could have decrypted it had gone out with the packaging.
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The drive had stopped appearing on the client’s laptop. They tried other cables and other machines, then opened the enclosure — a sensible next step that works perfectly well on plenty of other brands — and connected the bare disk directly.
Windows detected it immediately and offered to initialise it. They declined, correctly. But the plastic shell and the small board inside it had already gone in the bin.
Most modern My Passport and My Book units apply hardware encryption by default. Setting a password in WD Security adds authentication on top of it; it does not switch encryption on, because encryption was already running from the moment the drive left the factory.
It is not a passive adapter. The bridge chip translates USB to SATA and performs AES encryption and decryption in transit, transparently and at full speed, so the host operating system never sees anything unusual and no driver is required.
The data encryption key is held wrapped in the bridge’s own storage, not on the platters. A user password, where one is set, only unwraps it — which is why removing the password is instant rather than taking hours to re-encrypt two terabytes.
Read directly over SATA, every sector returns ciphertext. Windows finds no partition table it recognises, concludes the disk is new, and offers to initialise it. Accepting writes a fresh structure over a perfectly healthy disk — and that is the damage, not the shucking.
The disk was imaged read-only first and produced exactly what the diagnosis predicted: a complete image with no recognisable structures anywhere in it. No partition table, no boot sector, no file system signatures, no long runs of zeroes where unused space should be.
That last detail is the giveaway and it is worth knowing, because it distinguishes bridge encryption from ordinary corruption in about a minute. An unencrypted disk that has lost its partition table still contains recognisable material — file headers, text, large tracts of zeroed free space. An encrypted image has none of that. Measured across the whole surface, the byte distribution is flat and the entropy sits at the theoretical maximum, including in regions that have never held a file. Nothing but encryption produces that pattern.
Meanwhile the disk’s own health was unremarkable: no reallocated sectors of note, no pending sectors, spin-up and seek behaviour normal. The drive had never been the problem.
A compatible bridge was sourced by matching the drive family and board revision. This is the step that decides whether one of these jobs is routine or impossible, and it is more particular than it sounds — WD has used several different bridge chipsets across the My Passport range, and key handling differs between them. A board from a visually identical enclosure of a different revision will connect, spin the drive and return nothing usable.
With a matched bridge the decryption path was re-established and the image read as plaintext, at which point the job became ordinary: the partition structure appeared where it had always been, the NTFS volume mounted, and the data was extracted and verified by opening. The 7% shortfall was a small population of unreadable sectors in the file area, unrelated to the encryption and consistent with an ageing drive.
The original fault, incidentally, was the bridge board itself. The disk had been healthy throughout. Had the enclosure been kept, this would have been a straightforward swap.
Worth adding, because it catches people who have successfully shucked a drive before. On many current My Passport models there is no SATA connector anywhere in the unit: the USB interface is implemented directly on the drive’s own circuit board, with the flash or platters behind it and no standard connector in between.
On those, opening the case does not give you a drive you can connect to anything. It gives you a bare drive with a USB port, and if that port or its controller is the fault, there is no adapter that bypasses it. Recovery then means board-level work rather than a case swap, which is a different job at a different price.
If a WD external stops working, do not open it. If you already have, keep every part — the board, the plastic, the screws, all of it. It looks like packaging and it is the only thing in the world that can decrypt your disk.
And decline the initialise prompt. Windows offering to initialise a disk is not asking permission to read it; it is offering to write a new partition structure onto something it cannot interpret. On an encrypted bare drive it cannot interpret anything, so the offer arrives every time and accepting it adds a second, entirely avoidable problem on top of the first.
More broadly: the bridge board on an external drive fails at least as often as the disk behind it, which means a dead external is frequently a healthy drive behind a failed interface. That is good news, and it stays good news only while the interface still exists. External drive recovery is from £300 +VAT after a free 48-hour diagnostic — send the complete unit, enclosure included.
Bring the drive to our Oxford Street reception, or post it over — it costs nothing to learn what went wrong. You’ll have a written figure from the fixed bands before any work begins.