Hello friends,
I really need your help. I think I've got the classic problem here that I read about all over the forum, but I didn't find a good answer that could guide me step by step to pinpoint the problem and fix it. So I am hoping we can discuss it together and solve it. Anyway...

Two days ago my drive (WD My Book Essential 1.5tb) has stopped working. It gets power (lite turns on and blinks) and spins up, but it's not detected in "my computer" or "disk management".
When I connect the hard drive directly with SATA or another USB-SATA adapter it spins and gets detected in disk management but it says it is not initialized (I didn't do it - I want to get my data back). I guess that the data is encrypted by usb-sata bridge. I run HDDregenerator (no bad sectors) but I didn't run any other recovery programs because I don't want them to mess up the boot sector.

After that I tried connecting the bridge without the hard drive. It has power and blinks but it's not detected at all. Checked with USBDeview and UVCView. So the problem is probably here.


I know my best chance of getting my data back is to buy a replacement PCB bridge but even that is not 100% so I want to try and fix it first. And after all, they are not free and I will have to buy another hard drive to transfer all the data to.
Also, if somebody knows a program that I can use to recover at least some data without destroying the MBR (so it doesn't write to disc).

Any help would be appreciated. What can I test and measure? I have a multimeter but I'm no expert with it so you will need to be patient with me.
Thank you in advance!

Any update on this? I'm having similar problems!

I am not an Expert but i think that the best is to buy a replacement PCB bridge and recovery data.
As observed most of the times the controller itself goes bad
Good Luck