WD Mybook Essential 2tb not recognized, spins ok

[marcdry]

The moment I connected an old hd to usb with extension cord some wrong smellings came from my WD Mybook Essential from 2012 that also was connected to a usb port on my pc.

Running OS Windows 10, no password set on the WD Mybook, but is an encrypted hd by wd bridge and symwave chip.
The pcb's are: 4061-705089-001 Rev AG (on sticker) and on the back of the pcb: 4060-705089-001 REV.P1.

I powered off imediately, and after that when plugging again in the led of the external drive was lit continously apart from 2 or 3 blinks in the first minute.
It did not show up in Devicemanager nor in Diskmanagement anymore. Also not by a linux usb boot with PartedMagic.

So I decided to take the inside out of the WD Mybook bay, without much problems. Then visual examined the pcb's, l noticed quite some dark/black spots but that seems normal as for all pics I saw look like that. The USB connector looks 100%.
The drive should wake up when plugging the usb cable, but that does not happen. I have to use the powerbutton to get the led on, and de hd spinning. De hd spinning-sound does not seem bad actually, so I'm hopefull..
Because even linux did not recognize the hd, I guessed the pcb's are dead on one or more spots. I took off the bridge pcb with usb & power connector, and attached the hd internally in my pc. That made it visible to Active@disk, DeviceManagement and DriveManagement, and just now i'm creating an raw image file of it (takes some 8 hours) to an other hdd, though I'm facing to little space on that drive to image 2tb....


Any thoughts on this, I hate losing the data (family history 15 years back..), especially since I think the HDD did not crash..

Thanks on anyone willing to give some advice.
Marc

Attachments

HDD motorhood

HDD PCB back

HDD PCB front

Bridge PCB Back 4060-705089-001 REV.P1

Bridge PCB Front 4061-705089-001 Rev AG

[marcdry]

marcdry,
a better picture showing the Symwave chip

Attachments

WD Mybook Essential pcb bridge Symwave chip

[marcdry]

Solved in a very lucky way!
Just today a company sold 21(!) the same WD Mybook Essential 3tb on marktplaats.nl with - you wouldn't believe it - the same code on the pcb as mine...
I found out the code was ok only after bringing them to my home and dis-baying them.
The productno on board were the same, but I couldn't openup the bays at the sellers place ofcourse.

So I bought 3 pieces for 30€ each. And after swapping the bridge-pcb that takes care of the encryption/decryption, my own Mybook is completely ok again!
So instead of having a problem recovering 2 tb of data I am now facing an issue on what data to put onto 10tb of space.... me is veryvery happy.
Quite some hours spent before the resolution within the hour.

Some lucky guy here in the Netherlands.

Attachments

Seller had 31 of these....! Same productno....!

[abolibibelot]

That made it visible to Active@disk, DeviceManagement and DriveManagement, and just now i'm creating an raw image file of it (takes some 8 hours) to an other hdd, though I'm facing to little space on that drive to image 2tb....

The most recommended free tools to image a failing drive (that is still being recognized) are ddrescue and HDDSuperClone ; ddrescue can be set to use “sparse” compression, which is not an actual compression (the binary data is directly accessible) but doesn't allocate empty sectors, which can save a tremendous amount of space if the source drive is not filled with data, and even if it was filled it should save enough to fit a complete 2TB raw image onto a 2TB recovery drive. (But there may be performance drawbacks when writing a large sparse image to a NTFS partition, as I experienced once.)
Anyway, if you could complete the drive's image with whatever method, that's good news. How did it go ? 8 hours seems quite long for a 2TB drive attached internally. Could you check the drive's SMART status ?
Now, if the drive is indeed encrypted through the USB bridge, and the bridge is indeed defective, the problem is to decrypt that image. There may be workarounds. You could wait for a bona fide pro to chime in, or you could send a PM to member “kaeding”, who is very knowledgeable about that sort of issues and is the author of a dedicated tool, reallymine.
Or you could try to fix the bridge, but based on my rather limited knowledge this would be more of a long shot.