Using WD drive in new enclosure -- FAIL -- help please!

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for macOS
1

Hi, I’ve been using a WD Passport that has had some reliability issues due to, ahem, a cat that’s an asshole.

I was pretty sure the issues were due to the enclosure/hardware and not the drive itself, so I got a new enclosure for the drive to test the theory. Voiding the non-existent warranty, I know.

While the drive hums along inside the enclosure, it shows up as unreadable and needing to be initialized when mounted to my Mac.

I ran a deep scan for recoverable files, and what it recovered was basically a bunch of Western Digital stuff – utilities and things. That made me think that maybe the USB interface little board was encrypting the drive or preventing access if you don’t have it attached.

With the board reattached, the drive reads fine.

How can I access my data on this drive I own in a different enclosure? None of the utilities etc. I’ve tried will allow me to do this. I’ve never encountered any weirdness like this before and cannot find an answer on Google or these forums. TIA!

2

Well, depending on what exact model of Passport you have, it is possible the drive is encrypted. The decryption keys are stored on the controller board, so moving it to another enclosure will basically render the drive unreadable.

What you can do, possibly, is re-attach the original board, copy the files somewhere, do the swap, and then re-initialize the drive on the new board and then move the files back.

3

Yes, that’s basically what I figured out and am doing now, but I was unable to delete my topic.