My Book Essential 3tb External drive

needtoknow · April 24, 2012, 3:04am

I have several My Book Essential 3tb External drives - one suddenly died on me!

I verified via my other drives that the usb cord and ac adapter are working fine

The drive does not power up at all. No sound - No lights!

Drive not seen via disc management on any of my Windows 7 64 bit computers

I assume some power related part in the enclosure has failed.

Drive has not been dropped or banged. Working fine for months with about 2tb of data on it

Working fine up until yesterday - Just will not power up anymore. Even tried pressing switch above usb 3.0 port!

Wizer · April 24, 2012, 6:44pm

The fact that you have other drives will led to believe that you have a backup… do you?

Replace if the drive is under warranty

HDDRS · April 25, 2012, 4:00pm

enclosure or not you need to trouble shoot this.

If you not worried about warranty, then remove drive from the enclosure and connect it to a power supply.

If the drive spins then your enclosure is dead.enclosure itself performs the encryption by the way, so do not throw it out even if its dead.

If your drive does not spin up then PCB is most likely dead. Heads hardly ever get stuck on WD 3.5" drives.

do not initialize anything, or reformat anything

let me know what you find out about the drive’s state, and I will let you know what to do next.

Chee_Keong · July 22, 2012, 8:12am

Hi Guys,

I am living in Singapore.

I am having the same problem !!

But my drive still under warranty, logged this case and waiting for RMA number.

I bought my drive on 2012 Feb. and is not even one year, to my surprise.

Just wonder why do such case happen ?

Do not know if my data can be recover or not ?

Guess I have loss some confident on WD products…

just1rob · August 17, 2012, 5:47pm

HDDRS, I’m all ears!

I ordered a PCB online just to see if it spins up. YES. disk management shows unallocated drive and I’ve heard something about encryption. This board looks burnt by the way.

Will WD replace the board or should this “temp” board do the trick? I ran the WD lifeguard diags on it and it passed.

not sure what to do next.

(yes it’s out of the enclosure of course at this point) I heard the “USB Ding sound” and there it is but no files showing. shows up in disk management but not windows.

Thanks.

fzabkar · August 17, 2012, 10:45pm

The data will probably be hardware encrypted. If so, then you will need the USB-SATA bridge board to decrypt it.

As for the HDD PCB, each board stores unique, drive specific “adaptive” information in flash memory. This chip, or its contents, needs to be transferred from patient to donor. It is usually located at U12.

The following PCB suppliers offer a firmware transfer service, either for free, or for US$10:

http://www.donordrives.com
http://www.onepcbsolution.com
http://www.hdd-parts.com

I would advise that you avoid those suppliers who don’t tell you that a board won’t work without modification. Often they will attempt to obscure the requirement for a firmware transfer by deceptively describing their products as being “for data recovery only”.

Alternatively, if you are not adept at soldering, your local TV/AV repair shop should be able to transfer the chip for you.

Some PCBs do not have a discrete serial flash memory chip. Instead they store the adaptive data inside the Marvell MCU (the largest chip). In this case you will need a “PCB adaptation” service.

The following PCB supplier includes such a service for free:
http://www.donordrives.com/services

Sometimes the problem is as simple as a shorted TVS diode, in which case the solution is to just remove it.

See http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/TVS_diode_FAQ.html

… and http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/ (photo clips)

Could we see a photo of the burnt area?

just1rob · August 20, 2012, 2:23pm

I hope this helps…not the best quality but thanks for your time…I’m at work now, but I’m going to get crackin on this ASAP…you’ve given me the most helpful info I’ve received in like… forever!

fzabkar · August 20, 2012, 11:15pm

@just1rob, in your case the HDD appears to be OK. It does seem to be an encryption issue now. As for the “burnt” appearance of the replacement bridge board, if you are referring to the area around the mounting hole, then that’s probably just oxidisation, in which case I wouldn’t be worried about it.

The first thing I would do is to verify whether your data are indeed encrypted. To this end, I would use a disc editor to view the contents of sectors 0 and 1, in hexadecimal mode. (In DMDE, choose Mode → Hexadecimal)

Roadkil’s Sector Editor:
http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=24

HxD - Freeware Hex Editor and Disk Editor:
http://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd

DMDE (DM Disk Editor and Data Recovery):
http://softdm.com/download.html

If the data are indeed encrypted, then I can see two possible approaches for you. Either repair the original board, or transfer its firmware to the replacement board.

Your photo is difficult to work with, but near the largest IC (Initio INIC-1607E ?) there should be an 8-pin IC, probably with a “25” in the part marking. This chip contains the bridge firmware. If you are not adept at soldering, your local TV/AV repair shop should be able to transfer this IC for you. Whatever you do, don’t damage it.

The alternative approach of repairing the bridge board may not be as daunting as its sounds. I suspect that there may be a device in series with the power input that may be damaged, or it could be that an 8-pin dual MOSFET chip has burnt up. The MOSFET is an electronic switch that supplies +5V and +12V power to the HDD. If this IC is damaged, them we simply remove it and jump its two switches with jumper wires. I can show you exactly what to do, if you provide me with a detailed, close-up view of the board.

just1rob · August 21, 2012, 2:17pm

First thing I did was get you a better picture. hows this?

the patient board had no power at all…no light, no spin.

Donor board lit up right away and drive spun up upon hitting the power.

I’ll take a look at the contents next. Thanks again

just1rob · August 21, 2012, 2:31pm

Looks like encrypted (if I did view correctly).

fzabkar · August 21, 2012, 8:56pm

@just1rob, I’m a little confused. Are your photos showing your original USB-SATA bridge board, or is that a photo of the replacement PCB? What are the markings on the chips at locations U5, U4, U2, and U1? If it’s not the original PCB, could I see a photo of it, too?

Was the DMDE screenshot taken with the HDD installed behind the replacement USB-SATA bridge board? If so, then the bridge IC is correctly displaying your data, ie sector 0 is displaying standard Microsoft MBR code, not encrypted data. Note the “Missing operating system” text message, for example.

Win2K and Windows XP MBR (Master Boot Record):
http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/Win2kmbr.htm

A View of the Win2k/XP MBR in a Disk Editor:
http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/Win2kmbr.htm#CHS

I’m assuming that you have not written anything to the drive. Hopefully you did not initialise or format it. If that’s the case, then you are not facing an encryption issue. Instead Disk Management is complaining about the partition table. A drive is deemed to be “unallocated” when there are no partitions. Unfortunately your screenshot does not show this information. You need to show us the data at the end of sector 0. It would be good to see sector 1 as well. You can actually save these data to a text file. To this end, Roadkil might be easier to use.

just1rob · August 22, 2012, 2:17am

Oh no! I think I initialized! The drive changed color! Ill get the info u requested. I know I didn’t format but is everything gone? I remember putting the new board on and got the question on whether to initialize or not. I’m sure I did.

The detailed picture is of the defective board that has no power. The screen shot is of the NEW board connected to the drive.

HDDRS · August 22, 2012, 2:47am

If you used a donor bridge board and that spun up the drive but it came up as unallocated, then you can run a full scan on the drive and that would vertually rebuild the mft or the catalog file to let you see the data. I would recommend r-studio for its ease of use; however, there are other tools that are free that u can try and use such as recuva. Make sure you do not save your data to the same hard drive that you recover them from. Btw, can you show a screenshot of sector 63 with donor bridge board attached?

fzabkar · August 22, 2012, 11:10am

@HDDRS, just1rob stated that he was prompted to initialise the disk. This suggests to me that Windows was unable to detect a valid MBR (ie no 0x55AA signature), which in turn suggests that the donor bridge board wasn’t able to decrypt the data. If this is the case, then a full scan of the drive would be pointless.

I would first examine sector 1. If there is a repeating pattern of 16 bytes, then this would confirm the presence of 128-bit AES encryption. As for sector 63, that would normally be the location of the first boot sector in a legacy MBR partition, but WD’s 3TB externals are configured with 4KB LBAs, not 512 bytes, so the boot sector may be in a different place. For example, ISTR that Seagate’s 3TB GoFlex externals use LBA 7 (= sector 56) for the boot sector. Therefore I would suggest to just1rob that he systematically examine all the sectors in the range from 0 to 63, and perhaps beyond, while looking for a non-zero sector, or a sector that doesn’t have a repeating 16-byte pattern. When he finds such a sector, then we can be reasonably certain that it will be the boot sector, whether encrypted or otherwise.

I would also ask just1rob whether Windows detects the My Book as a 3TB drive or as a 746GiB drive.

As for the bridge boards, I would like to see how Microsoft’s UVCView utility identifies them, with the drive disconnected.

http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/USB_IDs/UVCView.x86.exe

This may help us identify any differences, especially in the firmware, and it will help to narrow down the fault in the original board. For example, if the original board communicates with UVCView, then this will tell us that its micro-USB connector is intact, and that the bridge chip is alive. We can then focus on the MOSFET switches.

just1rob · August 22, 2012, 11:20am

I hope I have sector 63 showing correctly.

I have R-studio NTFS. its an older version but hopefully it’ll work?

just1rob · August 22, 2012, 11:23am

@ fzabkar I will do as you suggest next. Thank you kindly guys!

just1rob · August 22, 2012, 11:34am

Other steps beings are being done now. Windows XP disk management is showing (almost) 3TB

disk mgmt.JPG

just1rob · August 22, 2012, 11:40am

With the drive disconnected, here’s what UVCView shows us:

—===>Device Information<===—
English product name: “My Book 1140”

ConnectionStatus:
Current Config Value: 0x01 → Device Bus Speed: High
Device Address: 0x01
Open Pipes: 2

===>Endpoint Descriptor<===
bLength: 0x07
bDescriptorType: 0x05
bEndpointAddress: 0x81 → Direction: IN - EndpointID: 1
bmAttributes: 0x02 → Bulk Transfer Type
wMaxPacketSize: 0x0200 = 0x200 max bytes
bInterval: 0x00

===>Endpoint Descriptor<===
bLength: 0x07
bDescriptorType: 0x05
bEndpointAddress: 0x02 → Direction: OUT - EndpointID: 2
bmAttributes: 0x02 → Bulk Transfer Type
wMaxPacketSize: 0x0200 = 0x200 max bytes
bInterval: 0x00

===>Device Descriptor<===
bLength: 0x12
bDescriptorType: 0x01
bcdUSB: 0x0210
bDeviceClass: 0x00 → This is an Interface Class Defined Device
bDeviceSubClass: 0x00
bDeviceProtocol: 0x00
bMaxPacketSize0: 0x40 = (64) Bytes
idVendor: 0x1058 = Western Digital Technologies, Inc.
idProduct: 0x1140
bcdDevice: 0x1003
iManufacturer: 0x01
English (United States) “Western Digital”
iProduct: 0x02
English (United States) “My Book 1140”
iSerialNumber: 0x05
English (United States) “574341575A31303839343733”
bNumConfigurations: 0x01

===>Configuration Descriptor<===
bLength: 0x09
bDescriptorType: 0x02
wTotalLength: 0x0020 → Validated
bNumInterfaces: 0x01
bConfigurationValue: 0x01
iConfiguration: 0x04
English (United States) “USB Mass Storage”
bmAttributes: 0xC0 → Bus Powered
MaxPower: 0x04 = 8 mA

===>Interface Descriptor<===
bLength: 0x09
bDescriptorType: 0x04
bInterfaceNumber: 0x00
bAlternateSetting: 0x00
bNumEndpoints: 0x02
bInterfaceClass: 0x08 → This is a Mass Storage USB Device Interface Class
bInterfaceSubClass: 0x06
bInterfaceProtocol: 0x50
iInterface: 0x06
English (United States) “MSC Bulk-Only Transport”

===>Endpoint Descriptor<===
bLength: 0x07
bDescriptorType: 0x05
bEndpointAddress: 0x81 → Direction: IN - EndpointID: 1
bmAttributes: 0x02 → Bulk Transfer Type
wMaxPacketSize: 0x0200 = 0x200 max bytes
bInterval: 0x00

===>Endpoint Descriptor<===
bLength: 0x07
bDescriptorType: 0x05
bEndpointAddress: 0x02 → Direction: OUT - EndpointID: 2
bmAttributes: 0x02 → Bulk Transfer Type
wMaxPacketSize: 0x0200 = 0x200 max bytes
bInterval: 0x00

just1rob · August 22, 2012, 11:47am

Here’s the defective board’s information: