Hello all - perhaps some expert can shed a little light on the gloom I am facing with my WD product.
I have a 1tb MyBook Essential - WDBAAF0010HBK - whose unbelievably delicate micro USB port has broken off.
Being on an ‘Essentials’ drive, this partition is encrypted - hooking up directly up through SATA reads as being unallocated; myriad data recovery programs see absolutely nothing.
In theory, I thought I could take a similar MB (with a dead hard drive) and switch out the bridge board. In practice, I now have a drive that is spinning, the bridge board is lit up, but I simply cannot get any recognition on a windows platform. Attempts to install/update the Smartware software are also failing to recognize.
Conceivably, I could see needing to solder a micro USB port onto the original circuit board for proper decryption, but that seems more like a final option - one that’s impossible to test if a computer won’t even recognize the drive + bridge.
Have I missed a step, or an option here? This is a mortifying reason to lose an otherwise functional drive of data.
Thank you for your time and consideration - Adam
