I'm in much the same boat...
My Book Essential that won't let me access the data. I've been all over the net looking at forums and such like this. It's crazy I just found this one and it's so recent. My problem is, there's nothing wrong with the components (like the common USB pcb adapter problem). Ironically I kind of wish that were my problem because then all I'd need to do is get ahold of a new chip with the same numbers on it.
But it appears my problem is logical, not physical...
Because I didn't realize this was such a common problem, a long time ago I used the Smartware to engage the password lock on the drive. So before the OS even recognizes any logical drives, a password has to be entered.
Here's how it works:
1) You plug in the power and USB for the drive, and it powers up.
2) A (virtual) CD drive pops up in the "Drives with removable storage" section. It's called "WD Unlocker".
3) You initialize the unlocker, and it asks for a password. Enter the password and the message says the drive is unlocked.
4) At this point, your drive is supposed to show up in the drives section on My Computer...but mine does not. After about a minute or so, a drive does show up and is assigned a letter, but no space allocation is shown (as it normally would be). In Disk Management the drive shows as all unallocated space.
5) Running the extended scan on WD Data Lifeguard Tools immediately pops up with "Too many bad sectors".
So it appears the drive just has bad sectors that are preventing it from fully initializing even after it says it is "unlocked".
This appears to mean that even after the correct password is entered, the drive still appears encrypted to the OS...meaning that even after "unlocking" the drive, any software still won't be able to do anything as far as repairing or even copying/imaging the data. (I've tried at least half a dozen different backup/imaging software apps, and they all basically hang while Windows continues trying to finish initializing the drive.)
Does anyone have this issue? And more importantly, have you found a fix?? I've spoken to a decent number of computer shop/data recovery guys, and they are all pretty much out of their league on this one. They don't even know the MyBookEssential has hardware encryption, nor do they even seem to understand what that means for their normal recovery techniques. It's kind of depressing. I need someone who knows what's up.
This is a pretty important set of data, and yes, for the first (and last) time in my life, I was caught without a backup.
Has anyone else been able to work this?