Another WD burnt PCB victim.. need help!

[gabster21]

My WD HD recently stopped working and I suspected it was the PCB board since the HDD wasn't even spinning anymore, but spins fine when plugged in directly via SATA. Unfortunately the files are unreadable due to the encryption.

I checked my PCB board which looks burnt and it has PCB 4061-705089-001 REV. AF printed on the white sticker BUT 'AF' was on a second sticker, when I remove it it shows the original sticker rev to be 'AB'.

I took pictures of my PCB for clarification:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/118 ... 115951.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/118 ... 120007.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/118 ... 120018.jpg

I have found the exact same PCB board here: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0820789506

The seller has even confirmed that he had the same AF sticker over the AB revision number.. however he warned me not to plus it in to a SATA connection since it might remove the MBR.. his quote below:

Note:
Your hard disk have been locked,You should replacement the correct My book control board,It will data recover safely.
Please do not try to data recover via plugged SATA or dock station, It will remove or changed your hard disk "Master boot record" !!!

Unfortunately I didn't know this and I have already tried plugging in the drive to my internal sata and run a recovery program (Easeus) to get the data which obviously didn't work.

So my question is.. is he correct and is it too late to try replacing the PBC or can I still try it and attempt to recover the mbr via some software? Don't care about the drive, just need the data.

Thanks!

[fzabkar]

AISI, Windows would have examined sector 0, seen gibberish, and left it alone.

You can try your replacement board. If it doesn't decrypt your data, then you may need to transfer the Winbond flash memory chip at location U4 from patient to donor. This chip contains your bridge firmware.

As for the board being burnt, if you are referring to the area behing J3, then I'm not so sure that this is the cause of your problems. If you have a multimeter and are prepared to take a few measurements, then perhaps I could help you.

[gabster21]

Thanks for the replies! I think my only option is to buy the new board and try it out, why WD decided to design their external drives this way and have dual points of failure for data recovery still alludes me

fzabkar, the reason I think it's the PCB is because the drive doesn't spin at all when plugged in via USB but is readeable via SATA (albeit recovering gibberish). Fiddling with the electronics on the board is above my skill level unfortunately

[gabster21]

Apologies for the successive posts due to no edit button.. I just got an update from the seller on ebay after asking if I would require a ROM transfer:

"You means is the hard disk SATA PCB board? SATA PCB firmware not a open-source,So,If the PCB died, we need chip(ROM) transfer to new PCB.(for more detail you can search Google)
In this case,the WD connecter card (4061-705089) firmware is open-source,I think no need to chip(ROM) transfer. because you can upgrade the firmware by yourself.
(if you sure that the old connecter card problem)
You can download the firmware updater on WD website."

Does this make sense? My understanding was that the firmware is altered by the drive so doing an update via the tool wouldn't be helpful.

[pcimage]

I think they are thinking that you mean the actual SATA PCB on the drive itself, which judging by your first post is not right.

Just buy the new SATA-USB bridge board and try and mount the drive, if it doesn't mount right away in windows then try and mount it with something like R-Studio getdataback.

If R-Studio does not find any data then its possible that a password has been set and/or the default encryption key has been changed, in which case you need to swap the 8-pin chip @ U4 as per fzabkar's suggestion.

[gabster21]

So heeding the advice of the veterans on this forum, I went ahead and ordered the PCB replacement.. it will take some time to arrive, once it does one of two things can happen:

1. the PCB swap works and no other intervention is necessary (really hoping this will be the case)
2. the data still cannot be read with the new PCB: ROM chip transfer is necessary (will need to find someone to solder)

Either case I will post the results on here to help others who might have the same issue, will stay away from WD external drives and their HW encrypted drives from now on.. any recommendations on alternatives?

[gabster21]

Something I forgot to mention that may be important.. the drive is external and what I previously referred to as the 'PCB' in the photos is actually the USB to SATA bridge (lets call it PCB1), not the the PCB on the bottom of the HDD (we'll call it PCB2).

So is the ROM on PCB1 or PCB2 or *gasp* both? If it's both, then what is the difference between the 2 chips?

Sorry for all the questions, I'm still a noob when it comes to HDDs

[fzabkar]

fzabkar, the reason I think it's the PCB is because the drive doesn't spin at all when plugged in via USB but is readeable via SATA

I wasn't suggesting that the bridge PCB wasn't faulty, I was merely questioning whether it was actually "burnt".

[gabster21]

fzabkar, the reason I think it's the PCB is because the drive doesn't spin at all when plugged in via USB but is readeable via SATA

I wasn't suggesting that the bridge PCB wasn't faulty, I was merely questioning whether it was actually "burnt".

You're right.. I may have jumped to conclusions on that one, could be just corrosion from the humidity (gets pretty humid in Dubai).

[gabster21]

I received the new PCB board and... it worked!

Not directly, I switched boards then plugged in the HDD, it started spinning again and windows could detect it but couldn't read any files on it and asked to create a new partition which of course I didn't do. I used a recovery program (Easeus) which ran for about 40 hours and recovered all 1.6 TB of lost data onto another drive.
Then I was able to create the new partition on the old drive and mounted it back into its enclosure and it's good to go!

Thanks to everyone who helped and hope this will assist people with similar issues.

[akapal]

I received the new PCB board and... it worked!

Not directly, I switched boards then plugged in the HDD, it started spinning again and windows could detect it but couldn't read any files on it and asked to create a new partition which of course I didn't do. I used a recovery program (Easeus) which ran for about 40 hours and recovered all 1.6 TB of lost data onto another drive.
Then I was able to create the new partition on the old drive and mounted it back into its enclosure and it's good to go!

Thanks to everyone who helped and hope this will assist people with similar issues.

may i ask why u put the encrypt stuff back together?
i have 5 external WD drives and im planning to remove all encrypt PCB bridges! i dont want to lose my data again from just a power surge

[Amarbir[CDR-Labs]]

I received the new PCB board and... it worked!

Not directly, I switched boards then plugged in the HDD, it started spinning again and windows could detect it but couldn't read any files on it and asked to create a new partition which of course I didn't do. I used a recovery program (Easeus) which ran for about 40 hours and recovered all 1.6 TB of lost data onto another drive.
Then I was able to create the new partition on the old drive and mounted it back into its enclosure and it's good to go!

Thanks to everyone who helped and hope this will assist people with similar issues.

may i ask why u put the encrypt stuff back together?
i have 5 external WD drives and im planning to remove all encrypt PCB bridges! i dont want to lose my data again from just a power surge

Well,
So Are You Planning To Buy Some Generic External Casing Without encryption ? .