I have a mini usb female side coming out of the back of my elements 2.5 tb drive. WDBAAU0025HBK-NESN. The usb has come off the pcb and now I am unable to use it. I figured I could plug it into my desktop through the SATA cables but when I do it prompts me to format the drive. I really do need the data off the hard drive so I am skeptical about lettting it format. I spoke to someone today from Western Digital and they mentioned that the hard drive would not erase if I hit format but they said it in a cryptic way that left me unsure.
The other option is I could buy another pcb card to use. I did get one but it didn’t work. The REV B is 4060-705078-001. The original says AF next to it and the one I got is an AD. I don’t know if that matters, I was under the assumption that the number just needed to be the same. Plugged it in and the drive turned on but hard drive doesn’t show up on computer.
Thanks and let me know if I need to add any other details,
Thanks for the response. I figured as much with the formatting but was hoping what the WD representative was saying was real. Would have saved me a lot of other steps. She made it seem that the formatting option on Windows 7 is just asking me to run something so it can read the drive and show me the files. Is this something that could be true?
I’ll message fzabkar. Thanks for the suggestion.
As for data recovery. I had a technician plug a sata/pcb card cord (thing) that allowed him to see it had 2 partitions but he said it might be possible to make an iso file from it but he couldn’t see the files themselves. Is this what a normal data recovery option is?
