I guess the title says it all. My WD My Essentials USB3 2TB drive died. Took it apart after doing the standard replacement of power supply with an identicle drive I have, and it displays no power.
Took the drive out, put it in my Win7 machine. Booted up.
Identifys the drive in BIOS, windows 7 wants a driver.
Put clip over pins 7-8 for what appears to be Xp compatibility, now it boots up and doesn’t ask for driver. But still does not work within windows.
BIOS sees the drive and the Device manager sees the drive just perfect, but cannot access it.
Assume the problem is the advanced format issue. So - how do I get this as a viewable drive within Win7? It has a lot of valuable data on it that I don’t want to reformat and loose.
thanks
For
It shows in Computer Management as Disk 1. Unallocated. On the bottom. The upper portion shows my C volume and the System Reserved. Which are both from Disk 0. It shows no volume for Disk 1, which is the drive in question.
Now what?
When I right-click it only gives me the option of ‘New Simple Volume’.
Being that I am afraid to do anything that will screw up the data on the drive, paranoia has set in on selecting anything…lol.
I should perhaps mention that in the Disk1 Unallocated down at the bottom it also says the same as the C drive;
Disk 1
Basic
1863.02 GB
Online
If that helps…
WD’s Essentials drives are usually (always?) hardware encrypted using 128-bit AES, even if you have not set a password. Therefore recovery software will be useless – you will only see jibberish. In fact you can use a disk editor to examine the first few sectors. If you see a repeating pattern of 16 bytes, then these will be encrypted zeros.
If you wish to recover your data, then you will need to repair your USB-SATA bridge board, or replace it with an identical one from an identical product of the same capacity. I suspect that a repair will probably involve bridging a fuse. If you could upload a detailed photo, then I may be able to identify it for you.
An added complication is that your USB mass storage device is configured with 4KB LBAs. This means that, even if the data were not encrypted, you would still have great difficulty accessing your data when the drive is installed inside your PC. This is because the naked drive communicates using 512-byte LBAs, but its data is structured with 4KB LBAs.
coppied from Converting external hard disk to internal after overvolting | Tom's Hardware Forum
Seems to be so.
Too bad motherboards cannot read this 4K in native mode.
But, I did receive a response from WD. They said that there is nothing you can do if a storage drive fails. You are basically hosed.
Western Digital does not sell or replace circuit boards for our hard drives nor are we aware of any other companies that sell them. Replacing the circuit board on a hard drive is not a recommended method for recovering data or drive functions as this will void the warranty on the hard drive. For every hard drive model that Western Digital manufacturers, there are many firmware changes that would make it very difficult to find a circuit board with the same firmware of the defective drive. If you attempt to install a circuit board with a different firmware than the original, this may damage the hard drive further. If you need to recover the data on your drive, please contact one of our recommended preferred data recovery partners.
So there you go. No help and no resolve possible. I will definitely not use storage drives anymore. What a waste. I will use external drives with identical capabilities as the internal drives from now on.
Live a learn.
