Hi all,

I was hoping someone could give me some advice with a drive that has failed.

I have a WD30EZRS-00J99B0 3TB hard drive that was previously inside a Mybook Essential.

The drive was failing to be detected by the BIOS or windows, but it wasn't clicking or making strange noises. It seemed to power up as it should.

On closer inspection, the PCB had burn marks on it. This caused me to buy a replacement PCB and fit this. I matched the part code and revision, but not the date as I was unable to get one exactly right.

Now I have fitted the new PCB, the drive is detected by the BIOS, but comes up with an error. In the BIOS the drive is listed as WD20EARS-00MVW which appears to be where the PCB is from.

My next action was going to be to swap the U12 chip from one board to another.

Can anyone give me some idea of if this is the right way to go with this? The prices I have been quoted for recovery are not worth the data that's on the drive.

Thanks,

Mybook Essential --> encryption

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Lemmy

After ROM change place back through original enclosure and try to access data

You need to replace the flash
But as was already mentioned, connecting drive to SATA will not make data accessible because USB enclosure applies data encryption

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SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

The USB to SATA device also has burn marks on it, if this is fried to, what are my options? Can i buy a generic replacement?

Generally the device can be decrypted through the same USB Bridge / Encryption controller. But if your data is important and you do not want to complicate things you can get it analysed professionally, usually at no cost.

I do not know if there will be complications if you use a non-identical controller. Maybe there will be, I dont know.

From my experience as long as the Initio chip is the same the data can be decrypted. I've never had to swap the 8-pin ROM IC on those USB bridge boards.

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Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.
Data Recovery Cape Town

Could we see photos of the burn marks to both boards? This will help us determine the failure mechanism, eg overvoltage from faulty adapter.

If you need to repair the bridge board, then see the following thread:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/27444 ... vervolting

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A backup a day keeps DR away.