I dropped it last week, but I am not sure if used it since. I recall unplugging the USB once without doing the safely remove thing recently. Anyway

1- When connected through USB, it lights up, spins, LED is on but windows doesn't show anything. Not even in disk management. On a different PC, it shows its name for a split second on safely remove then it goes away and says windows can't recognize it.
2- Took it apart, removed the USB board and used SATA instead. Windows freezes. BIOS won't detect it as a hard disk even.
3- There's hardly any noise. Only when it fires up, then it just idles with a faint tick ever 5-10 seconds.
4- Disk never had a password on it.
5- Recently I changed the drivename but I don't remember if it was before or after the drop, or the time I unplugged it.
6- No I didn't use any power adapter apart from the one that came with it.

I attached pictures of the boards. I can't find replacements for them anywhere. There are NO recovery professionals in the region, at all. I don't have the tools to swap the U2 chip if that is necessary.

The problem is more than likely of mechanical nature with the internal read-write system. Nothing to do with the electronics.

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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

Yes, a dropped drive gets R/W heads problem, and you should not power on this drive anymore.
Where you from? Maybe someone here in the forum can help you.
This external WD model does decrypt the data on the drive on default, without you setting any password.

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Rescue IT Datarecovery service Sweden
Rescue IT Dataräddning Göteborg AB
http://www.rescue-it.se

+1

if data is important send your disk to a reputed DR company.
DIY has it cons and pros, choice is yours.

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RAID/Server Recovery

labtech, mr_spokk, If it was a mechanical issue, how come replacing the board helps at least recognize the drive? It did so with this guy:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=26949&p=214414#p214414
and a dentist on youtube. This is what's confusing me. I live in the middle east(Dubai, KSA, etc).

chinopk, Did you not read what I said? No DR here. Would've sent it already and got it over with.

this is entirely different situation, because OP of the post has damaged enclosure, not a dropped disk.
Because of WD MY Book the options are really narrow, these drives are encrypted by the USB bridge.

Option 1:
what part of the world you are from ? may be someone will guide you to the nearest DR company.
we would also love to help you on this one.

Option 2:
you need professional tools e.g PC3K, DDI, DFL + understanding of FW (assuming heads are still ok) to successfully retrieve the information from the disk and price for these tools are way to high as compare to professional recovery + shipping outside of your country if required.

am sorry but this is fact.

TIP:
do not power up this drive any more, believe it or not, more you power up chances of recovery will be reduced.

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RAID/Server Recovery

Yeah I won't bother powering it up anymore. The disk wasn't dropped on its own. It was still in the enclosure when it was dropped. If that other guy had damage on his enclosure, it means it's from a drop as well. So it's the same case. As I said I live in the middle east(Southwest Asia, Arab countries). I guess I'd take option 1, if I can.

www.angeldatarecovery.com
In Dubai.

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http://www.northwind.gr
SandForce SSD Recovery
Ransomware Reverse Engineering - NoMoreRansom! partners

+1

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RAID/Server Recovery

+2

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

+3 highly recommended

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Data Recovery Ireland

chinopk, pcimage, CK,

How would you recommend if you never tried it? Says you're from the UK and Turkey.

Because we all know the main guy there (Vladimir) and he's proven time and time to be an excellent DR engineer.

He's "DR-Kiev" on this forum

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Fair enough. Thanks. I'll see if I can drop it off any time soon.

Just a question. What is supposed to happen when you run a WD mybook as an internal 3.5? Does it show up normally in windows or not?

these Western Digital drives are encrypted by USB bridge, it is useless to connect them as internal disk, you will not see any data.

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RAID/Server Recovery

+1 for Vladimir

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Digitalsupport Data Recovery
https://digitalsupport.dk

Essentials models are encrypted whereas Elements are not.

An additional potential complication is that 3TB+ enclosures are configured with a sector size of 4096 bytes. If you remove the drive from such an enclosure and attach it to your computer's SATA port, you will expose the drive's native 512e sectoring and end up with a 4Kn file system on a 512e physical drive. Windows will see partitions that are reduced in size by a factor of 8, but all the boot sectors will be in the wrong place, so Windows will offer to format the drive.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

chinopk, fzabkar, Ok. So the problem is definitely mechanical? Because when I tried connecting it through SATA it just froze up windows. BIOS took ages to load up and it didn't even detect the drive. That's not normal, is it?

The DR professionals have told you that it is most likely mechanical. I'm not a professional.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.