issues with portable 1TB WD drive

[crecomp]

hi all
i have a Wd 1TB drive with a damaged board, windows will not identify the drive when plugged in, you can however hear the drive spin normally, PC3000 will not id this as a usb drive in the utility.
i swapped the board with another donor board, drive will now be recongised by windows as being plugged in, pc3000 will show drive as a usb drive, but due to different rom on boards will not enable me to work with drive.

Just wondering if anyone has done a rom swap on these drive to recover data, there are 2 chips U12 and U14 as serial flash chips so am confused as to whch one to replace.

here is a picture of the board

thank you in advnace

Attachments

[fzabkar]

The photo isn't very clear, but U12 (Winbond 25xxxx) appears to be associated with the Marvell MCU, and U14 appears to be associated with the Initio INIC-1607E bridge chip. Moreover, U14 is accessible via the 12-pin header, so you should be able to read and write it with a standard device programmer. I expect that the data would also be checksummed.

I suspect that only U12 needs to be transferred to access the drive physically, but perhaps U14 contains important encryption information that may be required for logical access.

[BlackST]

BS.

[crecomp]

Interesting replies
Thankyou to all replies
Blackst do u want to share some more info
Thankyou

[BlackST]

Yes, IM is on. Depending on timezone...

[HHX3]

Hi all,

I'm having the same problem with the WD 1TB drive.
Could you fix the problem by swaping the PCB and the ROM?

Thanks

[Agent]

I'm thinking the U14 has ZERO to do with the encryption

[harddrivespecialist]

Hi all,

I'm having the same problem with the WD 1TB drive.
Could you fix the problem by swaping the PCB and the ROM?

Thanks

What do you mean by same problem?
Can you be more specific?

[HHX3]

I mean...

i have a Wd 1TB drive with a damaged board, windows will not identify the drive when plugged in, you can however hear the drive spin normally

- The drive doesn't show up. Tried disc management, UVCView, various dr software....
- Drive spins up & light is flashing
- no funny sound
- data not encrypted with WD Smartware
- problem appeared during copying ~600GB to the drive, I guess it got a little hot...


Drive:
- WD My Passport Essential SE 1TB
- WDBABM0010BBK
- USB bridge is on the PCB as already discusses e.g.
wd10tmvv-t16204.html
essential-stopped-working-after-firmware-upgrade-t16866.html

I took out the PCB but didn't have time to swap it so far.

Here somebody says that he was successful with swaping the PCB when the USB connector was broken. So why not give it a try when xy? part of the PCB is propably broken?

So in my case with this 1TB USB drive, the female connector was somehow damaged by the useless cables they provided because they kept falling out at an angle and must have bent one of the 5 pins that are required to power this drive. So on these drives, instead of the green circuit board having a SATA connector on it like 2.5″ and 3.5″ SATA drives use, this drive has the female end of the micro USB connection. What I did was take off the board that had the bad female connector and replaced it with the board from the new 1TB drive that arrived from WD. Once I did that, the drive powered up and hasn’t had a hiccup since, which was over a week ago.Link