WD Elements 1023 - WD7500KMVV issue - drive not recognized

[Fritz01]

Hi All!

as suggested I'll start a new thread for this instead of hijacking the WD5000BMVV thread.

I have a faulty WD Elements 1023 (WD7500KMVV) which shows the following behaviour:

- when plugged into USB, HDD spins up, sounds normal - no strange noises
- LED blinks or lights continously
- Windows Disk Management shows "eggtimer" for 2-3 minutes, nothing happens ...
- After 5-10 minutes, sometimes it is recognized as Drive E, but without file system
- Data Recovery software tell, that ALL single sectors are bad
- HDD goes to standby after ~10 minutes (spins down)
- Even when HDD went to standby, recovery tools still pretend to read "bad sectors"
(which seems strange as HDD already shut down)

I tried Linux and Windows, several USB cables etc. -> always the same.

I read a lot about faulty USB briges with those WD models, and some people would be able to get their data back by removing 4 capacitors and soldering a SATA cable to the 4 magic points. It seems like the Elements drives do not have encryption. I am familiar with soldering, but just want to make sure that the error could be related to a faulty USB bridge.

Is this issue likely to be a faulty SATA/USB bridge chip? Could I have any success when removing C13, C18, C31 and C33 and solder a SATA cable to the E71, E72, E73 and E75 points? Or does this sound like a completely different issue to you?

Thank you guys, I really appreciate any help !

Fritz

[HaQue]

Hi, try this:

-download the free partition find and mount
-plug the drive in, wait until you see the message about e:, but don't click anything, ignore it all.
-run partition find and mount and try to search for a partition with each of the 3 options in order.
-if one is found, right click on the found partition, and you really should create an image onto another drive if you have one, or alternatively, you can try mounting it to , say, V: and recover.

[DR-Kiev]

Reason of such behavior for sure not in USB bridge.
Most probably drive physically in poor condition and thats why USB firmware couldn't reach user space properly, or the FW has issue .
Your drive definitly not encrypted so soldering wires doesn't hurt and give lights what is going on .
And be ready to work with more comlicated problem, so better find proffesional help

[Fritz01]

Hi Guys,

I did the soldering job, but the hdd behaves the same.
Even when connected to SATA directly, it is not possible to properly access the data.

Anything further that can be done?

How would one be able to access and even fix broken parts of the firmware? I guess that is beyond DIY, but anyway would someone be able to explain roughly?

[HaQue]

How would one be able to access and even fix broken parts of the firmware? I guess that is beyond DIY, but anyway would someone be able to explain roughly?

It is like saying to a doctor, I feel sick, I know there is medicine, please give me some that will fix me.

until you know what the problem is, you wont be able to do anything.

did you try PFaM?

[Fritz01]

Hi HaQue,

yes, I tried it. So far it was stuck at 0% scanning. The drive continously spins up, does some noises (no clicking, sounds more like "seeking") for 10-20 seconds, then spins down. sleeps 10 seconds, then spins up, seeking noise, spins down. etc. etc. It would do that forever.

Capacity is correctly recognized with 750GB (in 1 of 20 tries).

[Fritz01]

Hi All,

OK I managed to get the following status now:

HDD is connected via SATA and recognized with drive letter and file system NTFS. Windows Explorer does not open the drive, but EaseUS was able to find 30 jpgs in first 10 minutes. It is processing very slow, but it works.

Question: what is the best option to proceed from here? I guess I should make an 1:1 image now and use that for recovery later? What software is recommended?

Thanks
Fritz

[HaQue]

Partition find and mount can also image. I used it to make an image from a drive that was failing in windows really badly and was able to recover virtually everything from the image.

[Fritz01]

yes, I noticed the capability to create images, but the thing is, that it pops up an error message every time an address could not be read properly
(abort/retry/ignore) ... so I would need to sit at the laptop for like 48 hours and click "ignore" every 2 minutes

Now I am trying with linux program "ddrescue" which seems to be very intelligent in terms of data corruption.

[BlackST]

This failure , as is, is INTERNAL . Likely the drive will become unresponsive at all eventually, it's a price you pay if you keep fiddling with it.

[HaQue]

Yes there is no "do this for all occurrences" checkbox, maybe by design.

you could possibly use something like Sikuli Script to auto click ignore.. http://www.sikuli.org/ If you are really wanting to continue DIY and not take to a Pro.

[Fritz01]

Hi All,

just wanted to let you know, that I finally managed to get ALL data off this faulty WD hard drive.
For the benefit of other's, these are steps I performed:

- first I removed the connection to the USB chip and soldered my own SATA cable. I did this because I suspected the USB chip to be faulty in the first place. In the end it was not the USB chip (the HDD still wouldn't recognize in windows) but I think this still helped me with my recovery as I was able to use the plain SATA bus instead of the usb detour.
Regarding the soldering: I followed some of the pictures one can find on the internet. I soldered the SATA connector to solder points E71, E72, E73, E75 and GND (The PCB version reads 2061-701675-304) - solder points may vary on different PCBs.
Note: Some say this would not work, because the data is hardware encrypted. In my case, this was not an issue at all.

- after soldering the SATA connection, drive was still not recognized by windows, it would even sometimes stop the laptop to go past BIOS checks. But, it was spinning up successful which is a good thing.

- I created a bootable USB drive with "Ubuntu Rescue Remix" on it, an Ubuntu version which has "ddrescue" included, a genious data recovery tool

- I started up the Ubuntu Rescue Remix system and connected another, 1TB empty hard drive which would store the recovered data

- I connected the faulty WD hard drive

Note: During the recovery, I placed a fan next to the HDD to save it from overheating.

- Using the command

Code:

sudo lshw -C Disk -short

I was able to query for all connected drives, and noted the /dev/ path they were assigned to in Linux. Sometimes the WD drive would just show up as "SATA drive" - then I cut the power and reconnected until it was successfully recognized as "WD-xxxx" drive.

- Using ddrescue (not dd_rescue which is something different!!) I was able to copy all readable sectors from the faulty WD drive to the working 1TB drive. The great thing about ddrescue is, that it creates a log file and marks all read sectors, so you would be able to restart copying several times, skipping the already copied sectors. It will also note sectors with read errors. For the log file, I used a separate 160GB usb drive with ext3 file system.

sample:

Code:

sudo ddrescue -n /dev/sdd /dev/sdc /media/usb0/rescue.log --force

explanation:
-n tells the program to copy GOOD sectors only (no retry on read errors). You can repeat the command using -r 3 later, to retry bad sectors. This ensures you get the readable information first, before you screw the HDD while retrying bad sectors all the time.
/dev/sdd is the broken disk (I got this information using the lshw command above)
/dev/sdc is the good drive (1TB)
/media/usb0/ was my logfile drive
-- force is need to force overwriting and none empty disk - always needed when performing a disk to disk copy

first, ddrescue stopped after copying about 4GB of data. I needed to restart the WD hdd a few times to come back online and continue using the SAME log file.

the last recovery process took around 6 days. ddrescue was able to copy around 365GB off that drive. I knew that only around 160GB of the disk was used. Since it was said that no heavy copy operations have been performed, I assumed those 160GB should be within the first half of the 750GB hdd.

- After ddrescue had copied the 365GB, I was able to boot to windows and the 1TB spare-drive was recognized with a 750GB partition (as the partition information was taken 1:1 from the WD drive!). Using windows explorer, I was already able to access the data.

- To make sure, I ran "Recuva" to copy all folders and files from the spare drive to a safe location. Note: You need to tell Recuva to restore the folder structure while recovering - it does not do this by default.

So finally, all the data seems to be back.

Thanks for your help on this forum. I hope this might help other users with a similar problem and the will to DIY.

Note: Of course, "Do-It-Yourself" might also completely screw the hard drive, so use with caution. In case of very important data, a professional recovery company might be the better choice!

Best Regards

Fritz

[fzabkar]

Nice work!

[HaQue]

Well done, and a lot of Kudos for posting a good detailed explanation. I am sure that this will help many people in the future.
Cheers!

[unknown]

You are lucky enough that the drive is ( ELEMENTS ) not encrypted.

Well done