Numbers off the case:
D33015
N3565
E101559
P/N WDBACW0010HBK-01 3413B
SN WMC1U9166614 R/N:C3C
Drive operated normally until last week.
Then power switch failed to turn the drive on. No spinup, no blue light.
Have an older 330 GB drive form WD that uses the same power supply (checked 12v 1500ma) Swapped power supply. No joy.
Removed driver from enclosure. Removed daughter card from drive. (Daughter card handles USB connection, power supply connection, and blinkenlight.
Inserted into open bay on Mac Pro.
Drive spun up.
But: No partitions.
Disk Utility gave me the option to ignore or format. Tried to repair. Failed.
TestDisk commandline utility failed to find partition table. Failed to find backup partition table.
Used unix tool dd to make an image of the drive.
Tried to recover with Disk Rescue 4. It found some WD files, and attempted to reconstruct others. All the reconstruction were garbage.
Tried to recover with Disk Drill. It found different files after 6 hours. Also garbage.
Tried to recover with DD-Rescue. See above.
None of the recovery programs found any of the 250 GB of jpg image files. None of them found any directory information.
The original user says she didn’t use any security or encryption.
Q1: Does this daughter card have another function such that connecting a drive without the card changes the view of the data?
Q2: Is there any way to recover the data on this drive?
