I have a WD 3TB extrnal hard drive which I have owned for around 2 years which has failed.
The facts:
When the power supply is plugged in the light on the back blinks as the pwer is switched on, and that’s it.
it does not spin, tick, or make any other noise.
I replaced the PCB with another generic model and it spun but the device was not picked up by Windows.
Disk utility did not recognise the drive, not sure if anything would seeing as it’s not spinning.
I’m not sure how much personal data would be on there since my last back up, so though it will be a massive pain the personal loss may or may not be acceptable.
Short of sending it away to a recovery lab is there any way to get a better idea of what went wrong?
I have not tried this, but if the drive does come up on the computer but the data is not visible i would recommend a data recovery software. Lets see if another user can share some information and help your out on this matter.
Here is a link that migh help you with the data recovery comanies also:
your drive didn’t spin up, and you assumed that the board on the drive is dead.
Did you swap the EEPROM chip on U12 position from failed board to a working one?
You must do this whenever you swap boards because some of the unique to your originla drive firmware is actually kept inside the U12 chip (adaptive data), and without it your new board is useless.
Is this a WD Mybook drive?
If you did swap the EEPROM, did you attach the drive to your PC via Mybook USB attachment? Without it your drive is not decrypted and that is another reason why your drive is not showing up in Windows.
