Hey I'm new to this forum and i would really like to get some new insight on my problem. I have an old wd elements se 1tb portable. I have tried a lot of pcb's. ( that's the thing that has re micro USB port on it right? ) but the drive spins but is not recognized by any type of computer. Pretty sure the board is fried. Tried swapping with so many boards off the same model but of course none have the same pcb. I reallly would like to extract the data off it. Is there anything else that I can do? Data recovery is about $600.
Is there a place that sells these boards? What information would you need to help me?
I would really appreciate it.
Thanks,
Michael

Does the drive spin up with the original board?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

You should be a little more detailed about your problem, like what was the initial problem, what have you done after and what where the results.

The drive does spin with original board. It even blinks a few times like it does normally. But it just won't show up on windows (storage management) or mac (disk utility). So I took it apart and discovered that I could unscrew the board. I began trying different boards but none seem to work even though they were the same model. I only tried the 1tb ones. I have tried a myPassport as well.

O ya, about a month ago I got really excited when I found one that matched the info on the sticker of the box. Same R/N and DCB. I was soon disappointed because it seem to have a completely different PCB.

Typically, these drives sustain mechanical and logical (corruption) failures more often than PCB failures in my opinion.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Well, I think it's really hard to get a proper diagnosis without checking the drive itself.

Has the drive been dropped on knocked around before failing completely?
How long was it used before it stopped working?

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

WD's forums are full of reports of physical connection problems with the micro-USB connector. That would be the first thing to check. IMO, the best way to verify the connection is to attach your USB cable and then use a multimeter set to the 200 ohms range to measure the end-to-end resistances between the USB pins at the PC end, and the respective traces on the PCB.

Use these pinouts as your guide:
http://pinouts.ru/Slots/USB_pinout.shtml

How does Microsoft's UVCView utility see the external drive?
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/USB_ID ... ew.x86.exe

Compare the UVCView reports when using the original and replacement boards.

A straight board swap will not work until you transfer the 8-pin serial flash memory chip at location U12 from patient to donor. This chip stores unique, drive specific "adaptive" information. Some board suppliers include a firmware transfer or ROM transfer service for US$10 - $20. Otherwise, if you are not adept at soldering, your local TV/AV repair shop should be able to do it for you. However, your problem doesn't sound like a board fault, unless it is a connector issue.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thanks for all your helpful response, I really appreciate it.

I finally had the opportunity to look at your suggestions.

Here are my results:

I don't have a multimeter so I cannot verify the connection yet.

UVCView does not see the drive.

It has not been dropped and I only bought it last summer but it unfortunately only lasted less than a year. Probably about 5 months.

The drive spins up and spins back down. The LED light continues to be solid however. The drive is not detected at any point.

When I swapped the PCB, it does detect the drive but it says it's not formatted and on MacOS, it claims that it is 2 TB. Because the drive shows up in my Disk Utility (Mac version of Disk Management), it leads me to believe that the board is faulty.

The drive is not detected at any point because it is failing INTERNALLY if these are the symptoms.
Place ear on drive with ORIGINAL board and likely you hear it spin up, heads unpark, a faint clicking that last 1-2 second max, then spindown. Eventually, this cycle repeats. In this condition it is also possible that drive SOMETIMES is seen but with wrong capacity and NO data can be accessed.
A straight PCB swap is NOT possible in any case (you have less than 1% probability of it working, but everything else MUST be OK).
If this is the case, it's heads or firmware related and NO uvcview, NO software, NO firmware update, NO PCB swap, NO other attempt will work - only professional help.

Sorry for bringing bad news.

It is not normally.
It should blinking continiously till you will access the data.
If it blinked only few times (two-three) it means that Inic bridge didn't "get access" to user area of drive itself but have tried, which means, in turn, that interface part at least alive.
Most likely you have problem with : sa\bads\weak heads.

So, better to seek external assistance for the money. It is not DIY case.

Only one good news in your case: despite the fact that it is using inic1607E - your drive still not hardware encrypted.

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Angel Data Recovery