Installing External WD HDD to JBOD enclosure

[slvrscoobie]

So I took 4 of my external WD HDD apart today and installed them all in a ProBox 4 bay JBOD enclosure. After testing one and it passing fine, I installed the other 3. 750gb, 1500gb, 2TB and 3TB.
However the 2 and 3 are coming up as 'uninitalized' or unreadable in 10.10. Plug them back into their own little USB adapter and voila. work perfectly.
Apparently there is some hardware encryption going on.
Since I am able to access the drives, is it possible to pull the MBR/partition table off it, and then re-insert it once its in the new enclosure so I dont have to write 5TB back on to the drive from my backup?

 

[TechpumpkinWD]

Hello slvrscoobie,

There is indeed hardware encryption on most WD external HDDs. Unfortunately all the data on them is encrypted and if you want to use them without the enclosures you will have to backup all the data to a different drive then put them in the ProBox 4 bay JBOD enclosure, initialize them and copy the data back.
Hope that helps.

 

[slvrscoobie]

Yup - thats what I had to do.
I had a HDD that I was able to move the relatively small 500gb from the 2tb drive over to, and then restore that in only a few hours. The larger 2.7tb of the 3tb drive already had a local back up so that took a few minutes to confirm everything was duplicated, and then both got reformatted and then dropped back on the drives.
mostly painless. Biggest problem was I forgot to copy the .bzvol folder which is where backblaze keeps its data. Luckily the de-duplication process kicked in, recognized it was the same drive name with all the same folders and had everything re-synced in less than an hour.