Please help! I plugged my USB cable into the port of my Book external hard drive, and it started connecting and disconnecting on its own. I unplugged it, and boom, I heard a piece bouncing around down inside the drive. When I call WD support for help they cant even recover my files or ensure that the broken port is due to their shoddy craftsmanship. Now I cant even get an email address to send pictures of the back of the drive so that I can have a new one shipped out to me. For the money, this is truly a shameful product and company. The experience has been terrible and I wouldn’t recommend buying their drives or any of their products. No matter what I do I will have to have someone repair the drive so that I can recover the data, which I will have to pay for from my own money, and then cross my fingers that I receive a replacement. Whats the best route to get a solution to this problem? Please help, thanks,
Well if it’s a drive that comes with Smartware the board that the USB port attaches to provides hardware encryption. Even if you can get the drive recognized the data will be encrypted and useless. It doesn’t matter if you used Smartware or a password or not. About the only thing to try is find an electronics repair person and see if they can sloder on a new port. The other is a gamble because the criruit boards are not really interchangable and frequently change. You can try purchasing an identical drive or search for a board on Ebay. Check the posts by fzabkar he explains about matching up numbers on the boards. You just learned not to trust one drive with inportant data no matter who makes it.
The same problem happened to me but fortunatelly my WD MyBook 1TB drive has triple interface (USB 2.0, E-SATA & Firewire) and I connected the drive by the Firewire port…
If your drive has only USB connection, just open the case (cabinette) and take the drive out as a simple SATA hard disk!!! Then connect your hard disk on one of the ports of your PC!!! Then your MyBook will stop to be EXTERNAL but you will not loose it permanently…
Ths hard disk will work absolutely nice and faster because the speed limitation of the USB 2.0 port (480 MBp/s) will not exist anymore!!!
The same problem happened to me but fortunatelly my WD MyBook 1TB drive has triple interface (USB 2.0, E-SATA & Firewire) and I connected the drive by the Firewire port…
If your drive has only USB connection, just open the case (cabinette) and take the drive out as a simple SATA hard disk!!! Then connect your hard disk on one of the ports of your PC!!! Then your MyBook will stop to be EXTERNAL but you will not loose it permanently…
Ths hard disk will work absolutely nice and faster because the speed limitation of the USB 2.0 port (480 MBp/s) will not exist anymore!!!
I wish I could help to rewsolve your problem…
That is not entirely true. If you have a WD SmartWare drive, then you won’t be able to access the data by taking the drive out of the case and connecting it inside your pc. WD SmartWare drives are hardware encrypted. That means that once the data is copied to your drive, it is always encrypted. You need the case in order to access your data.
Also, once you open the case, you void your drive’s warranty.
the warranty is already broken once the WD has a damage that has became by a BAD USING REASON!!!
Also… if the user has stored encrypted content… then the only way is to find a strong application that breaks the encryption…
But I think that if the user will try to open the drive’s content on the same PC (witch the encryption software is installed before) there is not any limitation to use the drive as before (on the onboard controller connected)
Everyone who lost data on their drives that is irreplaceable, the problem started with storing data on the external drives that was not backed up in the first place. An external drive should only ever be used as a backup for another drive, usually internal. If you need more space in the computer, buy a larger internal drive, and have a large enough external drive available to perform a backup. If you depend on any drive, internal or external, as the only source of your data, you will eventually lose your data. If the external drive was used only as a backup and it failed, the drive can be easily replaced and everything will be up and running again in no time.
As for the issue at hand, as others have pointed out, the best solution would most likely be to solder the piece back on. If the drive does have hardware encryption, it may be the only solution. If you can’t solder it or are unsure, find someone who can.
the tech must have botched the soldering process as now when connected…the light comes on and the drive spins but the drive is listed as ‘Not Initialized, 930.86gb Unallocated’
Can I take it to another tech and see if he can fix?
Has anyone ordered a replacement card off ebay and successfully accessed the drive?
There is is video on Youtube on how to remove the drive. Search for “How to fully DISASSEMBLE a western digital MyBook essential edition external HDD”
It would be nice if WD had a USB to SATA/IDE solution. It would seem to be common sense to manufacturing it so you can remove the drive and access it some other way.
Well, yes, this video show you how to open the drive, now, remember that this will void your warranty and this drives use data encryption, so connecting to a computer might not work.
