hi,

my 1TB WD MyBook Essential got busted. I plugged it in the other and it ran fine however after a while, while I'm tinkering my other PC I heard a "puff" sound then my HD stopped working. No lights, no sound. I decided to get the drive and transfer to a generic USB enclosure. WinXP detected the enclosure but the drive won't show up in "My Computer". I tried accessing my HD using Ubuntu but it also won't show up. Using Ubuntu's Disk Utility, it shows up there but asks me if I would want to initialize the same. I declined. After reading a substantial amount of info. I think:

1. The enclosure's PCB is busted.
2. My data is encrypted (even if I did not password protect my drive).
3. I need the Initio Inic-1607E to decrypt my HD.

Since I can't afford to hire the services of professional data recovery person. I'm thinking if could just take out the busted Initio Inic-1607E and solder it in another PCB of another WD MyBook Essential that I have. Will I be able to recover/ decrypt my files?

Thank you so much for your thoughts.

I have been informed that swapping the bridge board in a "Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive", model # WDBAAF5000EBK, is sufficient to recover one's data.

Perhaps yours works the same way ???

If not, then I'd consider transferring U2.

W25X10A, W25X10AVNIG, Winbond, 3.3V, 1M-bit serial flash memory, SPI:
http://www.winbond.com.tw/NR/rdonlyres/ ... 25X80A.pdf
http://www.datasheetarchive.com/pdf/get ... pdf&scan=n

Does your drive, in its new enclosure, show up in Windows XP's Disk Management?

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

yup it shows up in Win Disk Management. thanks for the reply.. I checked out my backup disk kept by my sister and it seems all my files were sufficiently backed-up. so I think I'll just reformat mybook and stop using its enclosure. Again thank you so much for the reply. I might experiment with the mybook enclosure though, if I have time. Again thanks for the reply