Is there a chance to recover my data?

It happens that I bought years ago a WD External Drive (1 TB) and the socket where te cable drive-to-PC suddenly broke.  My brother thought that it would have an S-ATA socket and all that so he decided to open it up and he only found a group of pins (of course, he never told me about this, I just knew the whole story a week ago); no trace of S-ATA sockets at all.

He thinks that these pins are there because it’s possible to build an interface with cables and serial ports.  If this is true, there’s a hope for my data to be stored in another computer.

My question: Is there a chance to build a special port so I can rescue all my data or is it just impossible?

I’m pretty much desperate, so it’s very importat for me to read all your opinions about it.

Thanks for answering and reading.  Have a nice day!!

Hello mate,

The connector is proprietary from WD, you will need to contact a Data Recovery company in order to retrieve your data.

Just fix the socket-to-pc connector! OR replace it with an equivalent. This is easy to do.

Actually, there’s no socket-to-pc connector… Excuse my ignorance, but all I see is a group of pins, no S-ATA socket or something like it… To be more precise, I’m talking about the hard drive inside a WD Passport… Any help?

Is there a chance to buy this connector? Data Recovery Service will be as expensive as this connector I suppose, right?

If something is broken off the board, whatever connector it may be, then it needs to be resoldered back onto the board.

I’m sure digikey.com would have it. If not, buy an already broken disk and swap the part. Or wire-in a standard connector temporarily.

Pro’s charge hundreds for this work. Your local electronics geek wouldn’t.

Thanks for the help, I’m sitll looking for this board or connector in digikey.com, but if I don’t find it, I suppose it’ll be a sad year for me… Anyhoo, thanks very much for helping me out with this one…

Ohh c’mon now. if all it is is a connector this is no big deal. The data should still be safe on the disk. And these are $5.00 parts. Bad comes to worse you can probably buy a defective drive on ebay and cannibalize it for parts.

You won’t find the board itself at digikey or any other vendor. And if you did, you’d need to swap a chip from the old one to the new one. Most likely.

Why not post some pictures of the damaged area and we can tell you for certain.

Will do.  I’ll post some pictures so you can understand this problem better.  Thanks for helping!!