Need Help - Repairing a WD Essential 2TB External

Hi all,

So first, a little back story…I bought my Essential about 8 months ago or so, and I managed to get it home okay (I was traveling at the time), but lo and behold when I plugged it in and moved it, the USB port broke. I managed to get it to connect a couple of times to get data on and off, but finally it stopped responding no matter how I wiggled the cord.

Now, fast forward to today…I bought a new 2TB essential (after having looked and found that a lot of people had luck switching out the PCB boards). However, I’ve now discovered that the PCBs in the two have changed in the few short months since I got my old one.

I tried swapping the drives’ PCBs, and while Windows 7 can now recognize the drive (small yay!), it doesn’t assign a drive letter…it simply connects the device as “My Book 1140”, and when I go into disk management, it asks me to initialize the drive. I’ve hesitated to initialize it because there are *some* files I need to get off the disk before I can re-format it.

I’m open to suggestions…anybody?

good job on getting the drive to be recognized at least

using a recovery utility you can get the data

I normally suggest to get Testdisk but there are gazillion options available…

just google and hope for the best :wink:

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Thanks, I will give it a try and see how I make out.

If I were to put the drive back into the enclosure (as it’s a brand-new enclosure!), would it theoretically function as an external hard drive again?

Edit: So I rank the TestDisk, and it’s saying it can’t find a partition. It also said that every sector was a bad read…i didn’t think that the drive had been that damaged :frowning: