A friend of mine gave me a My Book Elite that suddenly refused to boot up for him and I'm trying to see if I can get his data back. I managed to get the drive out of the housing, where it registered immediately after I connected it via HDD dock. The only problem: no partitions.

I was able to use EaseUS to restore what looks like the content of the drive (mostly a series of large video files), but I can't seem to open any of the files. Specifically, the video files are showing as what seems like the right size, but when I try to play them, I get an error message or a long list of seemingly random letters and numbers in pairs depending on the player.

In spite of the partition loss and the external drive chassis not working, it seems like the drive is error-free based on the scans I've run. Is there some other step to data recovery that I'm missing out on? Would it be better at this point to see about getting a quote from a data recovery specialist?