WD BAD PCB USB Device

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
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WD50000BMVW-11AMCS0  s/n {Edited}

This is a replacement RMA drive for another 500MB USB Passport with a busted USB connector. It ran for about 60 days and now is only detected (on any comp) as “WD BAD PCB USB Device” in device manager. It doen’t show in drive management at all and therefor no drive letter.

The BAD PCB part is fairly self evident I suppose, but I don’t know if there is a way to reset that flag or some way to jerry rig a cable for the seeminly proprietary 6+2 pin connectors (which I can only assume is SATA).

I was peeved when the first drive started to fail intermittently, now this failure has cost me an enormous collection of apps and ebooks. Even if I could get access to this drive for 15 min it would be enough.  This whole situation has really soured me on WD drives. Guess I will stick to Seagate/Samsung from now on.

On the encryption issue, I never employed the WD software so I don’t know if the data is also hardware encrypted to the drive or now, but I suspect not.

I am not above some solder work or whatever is required, however I can’t find schematics/pinout for this drive anywhere.

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b349/canadian69/IMG00165.jpg

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b349/canadian69/IMG00163.jpg

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b349/canadian69/IMG00164.jpg

Sorry , the photos are fuzzy on account of a crappy camera phone.

I also posted this question in Tom’s Hardware

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FYI, this was originally posted in the portable drives forum, some MOD moved it here for some unknown reason. I suggest that it be moved back or I will need to repost it. I have NO IDEA why this was moved into the off-topic forum.

update: wow they moved it back!

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What are you trying to do? I don’t think you have option of activating hardware encryption, so the data would appear to be encrypted on the drive even if you rig it up as SATA. Why not just get the same board from eBay and swap U12 chip if you convinced that the PCB is faulty? I think that would be the easiest way to access data.