Rescuing data from a locked external hard disk drive
From the glorious city of Boston, in the USA, sent an external disk, with which the local masters from Mass Data Recovery company could not do anything, and asked to try to save the data from there.
The disk had an open hermetic zone, so it was absolutely impossible to power it up without inspecting the condition inside. When I opened the cover, I saw a gorgeous scratch on the platter and a jammed guide on the magnetic head assembly.
By replacing the head unit with a donor one and excluding the damaged areas from reading in order not to scratch the platters in the process of saving files even more, we managed to initialize the drive in the technological mode and get the full identifier (passport) of the drive
However, when attempting to read the drive's microcode (service modules), an additional problem was detected due to the drive's process mode locking at startup.
To read microcode service information modules from a locked Western Digital external drive, you must patch the ROM by blocking the reading of module ID02h, which contains the drive's data sheet and a number of parameters. You can then disable the lock.
Since when writing data the disk performed self-encryption of user area sectors, which was performed by the USB bridge and CPU using encryption keys in the drive's service modules, reading information is performed with on-the-fly key decryption.
Encrypted 0-й sector
Using encryption keys to read files
Decrypted sector 0
As a result of the scope of work performed, most of the user data was successfully rescued.
