WD HDD SED Lock Firmware Lock Data Lock MCU Lock

For data recovery engineers worldwide, Western Digital hdd recovery is one type of typical data recovery case. Among all WD cases, users can meet SED patient drives, firmware locked drives, data locked drives and MCU locked drives.

Please note when these drives are healthy, users can easily access to the drives, read and write data properly. For healthy drives, users don’t need to care about the firmware area.

But when these drives are faulty and gets firmware corruption, these drives can become undetected, wrongly detected, capacity 0, etc. To fix WD firmware corrupted drives, users need to use ATA commands and ATA repair solutions and therefore, if the patient drives have USB interfaces, users need to convert to SATA to fix the firmware corruption.

SED=self encrypting drives. With SED and the firmware is corrupted, the firmware area and data area are not accessible. At this time users usually need to work in SATA mode, short tv9 and tv10 or do some necessary editing in ROM to access firmware area and repair firmware failure. For SED drives, in many cases, users turn off the SED feature to access the firmware but need to turn on the SED feature after the firmware is restored, otherwise, the data might be wrong and not opened.

Next we talk about firmware lock. Firmware can be locked by SED or DVR password or MCU lock or other third-party passwords. To remove DVR password, users need special DVR password removal solution to access SA; To remove MCU lock, users need special firmware unlock PCBs.

MCU lock is very common in WD SMR HDDS, it contains encryption information in main chip and users must use firmware unlock PCBs to access firmware and make best use of original usb PCB for data decryption.

Last we talk about data lock. When the patient drives have passwords or MCU lock or SED lock, the data is encrypted and users must use proper solutions to decrypt the data.

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