Hi guys,

I've got a WD My Passport wdbabm0010bbk-00 that has suffered from the seemingly common problem of the USB section failing. When connected to the PC it would say the device was not recognised.

I've managed to bypass the USB controller and connect a SATA plug and power wire following some info I found on the interweb. See the image below.

It is now recognised by the bios and Windows sees it, but not mounted, only as an unformatted drive with 'unallocated space'.

I never switched on any encryption, so I wonder where my partitions have gone?

I have run Puran File Recovery and it only managed to find data from the WD partition (SmartWare' or something like that. Lots of jpgs and PDFs about WD products.

I also ran Find and Mount and it found no partitions at all.

Any help beyond this point would be appreciated. Do I need to get a new working PCB and swap over the 2-bios? Is it a lost cause now?

Click Me

The main partition is encrypted. Use search function.

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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

To help you out further, the Bridge board that connects the USB cable to the drive will automatically encrypt the drive so if you connect it to your computer directly the computer cannot read the data. Best thing is to look at the bridge board itself. Perhaps the USB connector came loose and needs refixing.

Thankyou Shane. Would changing the bios chips to a new matching PCB let me access the drive?

Labtech, I did search of course, but I mostly found mention of the encryption the user can choose to turn on and off. Didn't realise the USB controller did it's own encryption too. Though I had begun to wonder!

Ahh actually, could anyone tell me what valued C13, C18, C31 and C33 I removed them to connect the SATA plug directly but now if I want to try and repair the usb section I need them back. I'll need to buy some replacements.

Better to pick from any other 2.5" drive.

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DataRecovery.bg

Hi,

I've managed to remove the usb socket and re-connect it with some thin wire and when I connect the drive to windows it now recognises the controller device and installs drivers

So, now if I just replace those capacitors I removed I'm hoping it will work again! It seems they are AC coupling caps so value is not critical and 10nF seems common so got those on order.

Tell me though, IIRC when I first connected the drive as a SATA device bypassing the usb controller Computer Management said do I want to initialize the disk and I clicked yes. Does this mean I'm fooked? It then displayed the disk as unallocated space but I never partitioned it.

This procedure would have rewritten sector 0. You can reconstruct this sector with a disc editor or data recovery software.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

But after drive is plugged with USB cable.
Better practices is to make first image of the drive before you do anything with it! Could save you from lots of troubles!

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DataRecovery.bg

Me again!

Okay so I have now replaced those caps C13, C18, C31, C33 and the problem comes back again. When connected to the PC it says USB device not recognised. The PCB makes this fast high-pitched blipping sound. As said above though, if those caps are removed it will recognise the device as an Initio controller. The caps appear to be coupling caps between the Initio USB IC and the Marvel sata one. The drive works if I bypass the USB controller and drive as sata device but I can't access my data.

Any suggestions on where to go from here? Clearly some other component needs replacing. Here is a video of what happens. I hope you can hear the sound it makes you might need to turn up the volume. Also the LED is flashing very fast.

http://youtu.be/rbxuMpTefns

See the you tube link above.

is this your own hdd? It may be a very easy and cheap fix for someone who knows that they are doing I suggest you contact a reputable company in the UK.