Hello everyone,

Surfing on internet looking for help to fix my WDBABV5000ABK Elements, I found this forum. I have to say that it looks pretty cool so I hope that I can learn something new about hdd forensics and at the same time fix my harddisk.

After some years in use my WDBABV5000ABK stoped to work with a lot of data trap inside. After spend some reading I discovered that there was some hope, I discovered that I could try to bypass the USB driver IC by soldering a SATA header in some points of the controller PCB and speak directly to the SATA controller. Unfortunately I jumped without think on to my solder station and I started to solder the cables without realize that also I had to remove a couple of decoupled caps to avoid interferences between the SATA controller and the USB driver. After I connected the HDD again (without remove this caps), I saw the LED light flashing but nothing happened (normal, the USB driver was probably interfering). After a couple of times trying to connect and disconnect the LED stoped to turn on. In this moment I discovered my mistake with the CAPs but it was too late, the controller pcb was completely unresponsive.

Reading even more I discovered that other thing that I could try was to buy a new PCB controller and transplant the old flash IC to the new PCB. After buy in ebay exactly the same PCB model (2060-701675-004 REVP1) and transplant the firmware ICs, now I still not be able to read the info inside of the HDD. The led of the new PCB is flashing and the USB is not detected by the PC.

I was almost about to try to install again a SATA connector but thinking about this again I have decided that my initial failure was be on a rush because I was afraid about to loose the data inside of the HDD, so rather than follow doing stuff without knowledge I would like to gather some information before continue. The data inside of this HDD is something that I would like to recover, typical pictures and family stuff however, after discover that in this forum there are people with a lot of knowledge about hdd recovering ,I think that it would be more valuable try to get knowledge about this world.

Can anyone help me about how to start to get info about this world and specially about how to fix my HDD. Is there any UART/JTAG port that can be used for debbuging the controller? how the PCB controller works (as much as deep explanation is possible)? there is any open hardware/software that can be used to analyse the HDD?

First off, what was the original symptoms that made you want to solder a SATA port onto your drive? Very likely the PCB was never at fault, and you've just further complicated the situation.

The PCB on these can be very easily replaced with another one either USB or SATA by just properly matching it and transferring the 8 pin chip labeled U12 which contains the adaptive ROM. However more than likely this will only get you back where you started before you began messing around.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

The original symptoms were, the hdd was not detected at all by linux or windows. But I couldn't listed any clicking noise. The PCB version is the one with two flashes the U12 and the U14

You could buy 1672 pcb which is sata version of your board, transfer U12, solve slow responding problem, make sector by sector copy to other hdd and decrypt data by free software.

You don't need to worry about the U14, just the U12 matters.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Hello thanks to both of you for the answers.

@drHDD wouldn't be the same replace my PCB by the controller that you tell me?. I suppose that this version wires directly the SATA controller to a SATA connector rather than use a USB driver IC.

@data-medics which kind of parameters are inside of this memories? why are there 2? More or less I have a global view about each IC but there is no that much specs/info on Internet.

By the other hand is there any debuging port on this PCB that can provide some info/error messages?

@lordrafa, the PCB is essentially a SATA HDD with a USB-SATA bridge at the front end. U12 contains the boot code and data for the HDD while U14 contains the operating code for the bridge IC.

If you follow drHDD's advice, you will need "reallymine" freeware to decrypt your data. Use ddrescue to clone the drive.

The "slow responding problem" is addressed by HDDSuperTool (freeware).

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thank you for your post fzabkar.

I have taken a look to the documentation found in this forum about wester digital, how a hdd works and the hdd firmware, it is really interesting but I can say that is going to take ages to process all this info at least this community looks really willing to help.


Before jump again to buy a new PCB, I have tried to modify my USB PCB to add the SATA connector. This time I took my time to recheck everything. However when I boot linux I can see this errors:


This is problematic because I can't start to use any of the tools that you told me if the block device node is not created by the kernel. Is there anyway that I can try to use this tools.

By the way is this related to the "slow responding problem"

BTW I have being cheeking where could I find a SATA version of my controller. Checking on ebay I found a seller that sells the PCB 2060-701672-004 to fix a WD5000BEVT. I thought that maybe I could buy a fully working WD5000BEVT to get the PCB from there to be sure that the PCB was correctly working but when I checked on other seller the PCB of a WD5000BEVT I found that the PCB was a "2060-701499-000 REV A". Could I use this PCB too?

EDIT: Also I found this PCB 2060-771672-004, this looks closer to the 2060-701675-004 because uses the components (of course without the USB controller)

Have you tried inverting the position of the sata data wires ? Also, can you post some pictures of your converted drive ?

Hello thank you again for the answer, this are the connections. The SATA cable is not twisted so the wires from left to right correspond with the connector pins 2,3,5,6 starting to count from left in the picture.

@lordrafa, the easiest way to confirm the SATA pinout is to compare the USB and SATA PCBs. Follow the SATA Tx/Rx traces back to the MCU (88i9045).

http://ep.yimg.com/ay/yhst-144375849714 ... d-fw-1.gif

http://ep.yimg.com/ay/yhst-144375849714 ... 1672-3.gif

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

1. Have you removed the capacitors ?
2. E71 goes to 2 (A+), E72 goes to 3 (A-)...

The pinout looks fine. A+ and A- goes to E71 and E72 and B- and B+ goes to E73 and E75 and I have tracked the SATA PCB a looks fine. Also I have removed the CAPs. BTW removing this CAPs looks a little bit dangerous, maybe it would be better cut the tracks and solder the SATA before the CAPS. I say this because I think that I have fried again the controller, because again I am not getting any response. I think that I am going to give a shoot to the SATA version PCB. Can you confirm that this is the one that I need 2060-771672-004.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

My apologies for the delay repliying, I have been bussy for away and I have to park this. Since I did´t trust that much on the PCB that I bought on ebay I decided to buy a working WD5000BEVT that has a sata version of my PCB (2060-771672-004) and I exchanged the U12 and... EUREKA it worked I have downloaded all the files to a safe place thank you so much for your help I thought that the info would be completely lost forever.

I would like to learn a little bit more about how the HDD works and how harder damage can be fixed. This would be some areas that I would like to know:

Why there are collections of firmware images, I suppose that they are used to fix a corrupted firmware but how are they used?
If there any free tool that can read a firmware image and unpack the stuff inside?
I read that the firmware is composed by modules, we can I get more info about what does each module?
What info is stored on the plates?
Also one of the answers that I got previously said that I could have a "slow responding problem" what does this mean why a hard this could have this problem?

thx Spildit looks like the page is down. It looked pretty cool with a lot of material I hope it comes back again.