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. 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?
Find somebody that works on electroincs and is able to do the soldering and have them solder on a new port. Next you can try to find a matching board on Ebay but there is no guarantee it will work. The same for taking the board out of a similar drive. Then there is professional data recovery. The drives with Smartware are hardware encrypted so hooking up as an internal or in another enclosure won’t work. Anything recovered that way will be emcrypted.
Joe
I FIXED IT !!!
take the hard drive apart, look at the board were the USB port broke off, there should be a cerial number on there !
I typed that number in ebay and the part came up, some place in China has them on there for about $25, i got the part pluged it in and my hard drive is as good as new ! workes fine.
im so happy wanted to tell everyone ! lol
Hey i know this is a old post, but i am going throught the exact same scenario you went through. The problem is one fine day i try to connect my hard drive and bam! i hear something moving inside my hard disk. Since, its warranty was already over, I opened up the WD MyBook Essentials 1TB, and extracted the HDD and the broken USB port. I took it to the electronics guy, and he fixed it back to the Chip. Later on when i connected my HDD, it turned on, but nothing was detected.
Iam getting desperate. Please help me, You also mentioned about some serial number, I tried everything, but nothing comes up.
Thanks
Try searching the posts by fzabkar. In some of them he mentions matching the numbers up. If you can’t fins anything send him a PM.
Joe
Hi! I need help. I think that images are more than words
http:// imageshack.us/f/441/p2180044.jpg
can I connect through this?
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/96/p4020062d.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/822/p4020061z.jpg/
more info:
The USB Port is broken or that I think so, more pics:
http://img849.imageshack.us/img849/2299/p4050081.jpg
[edited]
http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/511/p4050083.jpg
http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/2097/p4050086.jpg
what I can do?
All these are easy fixes if a competent tech does the work. No room for sloppiness. And even if that board can’t be fixed (for some odd reason) you can get a cheap replacement. These are generic and cheap interfaces.
Failing that! … you can just grab the data from the sata connector and trash the outer plastic housing. These are easy fixes.
I had the same issues, I tried to put the usb port back on the board, then i realize my pulse is not to good, so i took it to someone better than me, and he actually did put it back on, but the drive is still not recognize. Sooooo, I’m considering now to forget about the data on the drive, but, would i be able to get rid of the encryption by formating the drive, anybody knows?
