WD My Passport Physical Repair/Recover

[ATB88]

Hi there!

I have an old Western Digital WD10JMVW-11AJGS0 mypassport drive from 2013, and it has recently stopped being recognized by my new macbook pro, and does the rhythmic beeping/clicking. After doing some research it sounds like this is usually caused by heads being stuck on the platters. I have attempted to repair the drive myself (I know, this is generally a bad idea, but the data here isn’t that valuable and I’ve actually taught clean room microelectronics lab classes, so I have a higher aptitude for this than the average person – still not a great idea vs a professional that specializes in this repair, but anyway). Upon opening the case, I was expecting to find the heads stuck to the platters, as that seems to be the usual cause of the beeping issue. Instead I found that the heads actually were not on the platters at all, and that the platters appeared to be completely damage free. If the heads aren’t stuck to the platter, what’s does anyone know the next most likely cause of the beeping issue?

Interesting data point: I put the cover back onto the drive and tightened only a couple of screws. Plugged the drive in and miraculously, it spun right up, no clicks and no beeps! However, it was not at all recognized in Disk Utility in MacOS, so, something’s still up. Now, the interesting part is: if I keep it running and put two more screws in (that secure the case to the head assembly) the beeping returns! Undo the screws, the beeping goes away. Does this give better insight into what the issue is and whether or not there’s a possibility I can repair this myself?

Also, what drives have interchangable parts for my drive? I see on ebay that there are many variants of the WD10JMVW. My particular variant, 11AJGS0, seems to be much rarer and much more expensive than the others, at least on ebay. If I were to purchase a drive for donor parts, does it need to be a 11AJGS0 variant? Or will any variant of the WD10JMVW do?

I’m looking into having the drive recovered by a professional, and a place local to me, https://www.300dollardatarecovery.com/ , has quoted me $500 before any replacement parts. $100 of this charge is a flat fee that they add for “encrypted” drives, which they insist that this model of drive is. Is this drive really encrypted? If this drive just had software encryption, then I’d like to argue that the $100 encryption fee shouldn’t apply here, as I definitely was not using the the encryption software and had completely wiped the drive of any such software before putting my data on it. I just haven't been able to find any definitive information out there about this model. Do I have a case?

Finally, if I got the professional route, can I do better than a $500 flat fee (before replacement parts) for a professional (I’d be willing to pay an amateur for half the price, again, this data isn’t essential to recover) to recover this drive?

Thanks for any insights

[lcoughey]

My lab has a higher rate for clean room work, if heads are needed, but our base rate is lower, $450 CAD. It only takes a couple minutes to convert to sata and the click of a box to deal with encryption.

[pcimage]

For an opened drive, those fees seem very reasonable IMHO

[einstein9]

@ ATB88

If you don`t need any data why bother?

[ATB88]

@ ATB88

If you don`t need any data why bother?

It would be nice to have it, but I don't need it. At least, I don't think it's worth $500 to me.

I understand fully that you get what you pay for with professional recovery services, and I'm not by any means saying such a service isn't worth the charge, it's just in this case the data in question doesn't justify that kind of expense. On the other hand, I like tinkering with things and have experience in microelectronics fab from a previous life, so, I'm also just curious to see if I can pull this off. By no means do I think that what I'm doing is smart, it's definitely very risky. But I'm interested in seeing what I can do on my own, even if it means possibly losing the data.

[ShaneWard]

WD like to encrypt the data without the user knowing about it on a hardware level on the bridge board. I don't know why they do this but they do. The data on the drive is encrypted until that same USB brigeboard is used to read the drive.

[pepe]

AJGS0 is FBlite, which means SED is off on these, ie. not encrypted.

Why WD use encryption on SED drives (or drives with encrypting USB bridges) even if no pwd is set is pretty clear: Once the user decides to set a password there's no need to encrypt the whole user data (which would take hours), as it is already encrypted, they only need to encrypt the AES key (which takes a moment at most).

pepe