Hi HDGuru forumers,

My cousin has a My Book Essential external hard drive that quit working so she turned it over to me hoping that I may be able to get the data off of it. In the past she had another external USB Western Digital hard drive that quit working so I removed the drive from the enclosure and plugged it in directly to my computer's SATA port and I was able to get the data but that didn't work this time.

I'm not sure how important is the data on the drive that I'm working on now. She was hoping I could retrieve the data but I'm not sure if she is willing to pay for the services of a data recovery company. If I figured out approximately how much the services of a data recovery company would cost her then she may be able to give me a more definite answer about what she wants to do.

When I removed the drive from the enclosure I noticed some odd coloring on the PCB of the SATA to USB bridge controller and the hard drive's PCB that suggests excessive heat or burning. However, none of the components on the bridge controller's PCB look damaged. Also, the drive seems to malfunction the same way when connected by USB through the bridge controller and when connected directly by SATA to my computer so I doubt the bridge controller is the problem. All of the components on the hard drive's PCB are hidden between the metal case of the drive and backside of the PCB so I can't see what those components look like. I would try taking off the hard drive's PCB so that I can see the components but I can't find a matching torx screwdriver right now. I'd include pictures of the PCBs with this thread but I'm not sure where the camera is. Hopefully after those two things are sorted out I can add some pictures to this thread.

I tried connecting her drive to my computer by SATA and running Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for Windows to get SMART data about the hard drive but the program said that the SMART data was unavailable. My cousin's drive was plugged in to the same SATA controller that my own hard drive was plugged in to and my own hard drive had SMART data so the problem wasn't that I connected the drive to a controller that doesn't support providing SMART info. When I tried running a quick test on my cousin's drive the test quit and the program told me there were too many errors- sector errors, I think.

I have an old 80 GB WD hard drive in an external enclosure that acts up one in a while. Sometimes the drive starts to spin up, then there's a click and it suddenly spins down, and it tries to spin up again. It will do that repeatedly. If I change the drives orientation, for example if it is lying flat and I place the enclosure on it's edge, then the drive will often start working normally again. I tried the same thing with my cousin's drive but it still didn't work. The way my drive and her drive were behaving seemed different but I thought changing her drive's position was worth a try.

I want to attach a file that is an audio recording made at 44.1 kHz of her drive trying to work. You can hear me plug the drive's USB cable in to the computer, the drive spins up, it tries to do something for a few seconds, then I unplug the USB cable, and the drive spins down. Sorry if the recording is poor quality. I am inexperienced at making recordings, my mic is inexpensive, it was taped to the hard drive, some of the noise is from the computer's fans, and some of the noise is from boosting the gain of the mic. When I try to attach the file to this post I am told that the mp3 and m4a extensions are not allowed. Am I allowed to attach an audio file?

Western Digital My Book Essential 2 TB
P/N: WDBACW0020HBK-00 3311D

WD20EARS-00MVWB0
Date: 17 Jan 2011
PCB: 2060-771698-002 Rev P1

SATA to USB bridge controller
Chip: Symwave, SW6316-3VB14, D0U846 00, A4, C10397 AK
PCB?: 4061-705089-001 Rev AG

I'm not a data recovery professional, but ISTM that your drive has an internal fault.

In any case, even if the drive were OK, you would not have access to the data when the drive is connected directly to a SATA port. This is because the data are hardware encrypted, even if you have not set a password. The bridge firmware handles the decryption.

As for your attachments, you could ZIP them.

BTW, what capacity does your drive report?

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Nice. My first post on this forum and I typed the name of the site incorrectly.


Earlier I read a little about that. I was hoping that wouldn't be the case with this drive. However, because of how the drive is not working I guess I don't need to worry about that now.


Ok. I was hesitant to try that in case I would be circumventing the forum rules somehow. I attached a .zip file to this post.

My pictures of the circuit boards were garbage. Fortunately I found a helpful thread in this forum:
Another WD 2TB Stops Access - My Book Essential (PCB pics) BJ12's pictures are better than mine and the discolorations of the PCBs of the My Book Essential I am working on are in the same places and have the same colors as what are shown in his pictures.


The drive was detected only a couple times and I can't get it to work tonight. I don't remember the reported capacity or if there was a reported capacity. Once I saw the drive listed in the boot menu of my motherboard's UEFI BIOS but there wasn't a disk capacity next to the entry. Once the Data Lifeguard Diagnostics program found the drive but it hasn't found the drive since then. I only remember that it was listed in the program. This evening I tried plugging in the drive again. The drivers were automatically installed (except the WD SES driver which I downloaded from WD and installed) when I connected the drive to my computer's USB 2.0 port. Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media called the drive a My Book 1130. Occasionally a window popped up and asked if I wanted to format the drive. In Disk Management the drive wasn't listed. In Data Lifeguard Diagnostics the drive wasn't listed.

My cousin told me she found some of the files she wanted to recover on one of her other external hard drives so I don't need to worry about horribly complicating the recovery of the data that's on this My Book Essential by trying something wrong.