broken USB port on Western Digital external hard drive - data recovery solution

Author: uk7769
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21m 9s Lenght
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BROKEN USB PORT!!!!!! SOLUTION THAT WORKED FOR ME: Have a technician solder the USB port back on to the SATA to USB controller board. Then use data recovery software to recover your files. I used Wondershare Data Recovery software. WESTERN DIGITAL MY BOOK ELITE 1 TB EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE WDBAAG0010HCH-00 My solution to broken a USB port: had it soldered back on, and used Wondershare Data Recovery software to retrieve my files. WARNING to those with Western Digital external hard drives!! I just learned the hard ways. On the WD My Book Elite external hard drive I used for my backups, the little micro USB port on it snapped right off the circuit board!!! I thought, no prob. I cracked open the enclosure, (yes it was already out of warranty) removed the bare hard drive, connected the bare drive to my computer directly via SATA and power cable. And guess what? I could NOT see any data on the drive. OS said the drive was unallocated, as if it had no partition. The Western Digital SATA to USB controller board used on their external hard drives is designed so you can't use the bare hard drive in any other enclosure, or in any computer. I could not find replacement parts or any other solution. Disaster! BEWARE if you use Western Digital external hard drives, you are screwed if the USB port or the enclosure breaks. Google it, this same problem has happened to countless others. I had to have the USB port soldered back on, and then had to use data recovery software to get my data back off that drive.

Comments

  1. Thanks for sharing your personal experience with My Book and clarifying the different options and their implications!
  2. great video. thanks for sharing.
  3. so if you arent worried about data. Can you take HD out of enclosure and hook up with sata and put in pc and format it and use it as drive D/E/F? whatever...and get rid of external case and extra board? And basically use as internal drive
  4. Hi, i have the same issue just like yours and i removed the hdd off it's casing and put it on a SATA connection hoping that it will detect all of my files. (I did not do some research about this) so i have been initialize the partitioning style to GPT (GUID partition table). As you have mentioned, all of the files will be overwritten/deleted, and my drive is currently at RAW state.

    Is there anyway that i can save my files? Btw i also tried the soldering method of the usb port and i think it didn't turn out well. But then i tried and tried until the port is detected and bad news, it is now considered as unknown device.

    I'm very pissed off once i knew about the encrypting hardware in it.

    Any suggestion about my case?
  5. ECparts is one of the biggest fucking scam game. Avoid them at all cost!!! Buy from someone in the USA. The people at ECparts in Hong Kong don't give a damn. Buy the control board from someone selling the USA. Buy a NAKED hard drive and copy everything too that new hard drive and get your data back. Don't think that the SATA Bridge card is going to last. You've got 6 months to a year before the card dies and you're in the same boat. EC Parts offered a year warranty. It's even stamped on the part they sent 1 year warranty. Customer service told me it was only 60 days and then offered me a 10% discount on a $58 dollar part!!?!! Screw them!
  6. i contacted WD support and they are going to send me a new drive. But that doesnt fix the problem of transferring the existing data on my broken drive. My usb is stuck inside the box and has broken off as well. Its jingling around in there
  7. Thx for retracing all your steps and showing us how you came up with a solution. I was wondering however after you went through all the trouble of resoldering the usb port why this device would not work as before? Could it be because you had (soft) repartitioned or activated it in Windows whilst experimenting with the (pre-repair) direct hook-up of the drive in your PC? I also was wondering could the recovering software not be used whilst you had the drive in this situation, i.e. directly connected on one of your SATA ports and sata power cables of your pc (I mean before you put the drive back on the WD board with repaired USB socket)? I currently have a WD 'My Book Essential' of 1.5 Gb and I have just noticed that this foolish new design of the Micro USB B Male socket and cable are not suited for frequent insertion and disconnection. I now have a probably still ok hard drive inside the enclosure but a Micro USB B Male + socket problem that does no longer make a proper connection making the drive not show up in my computer. With the networked NAS devices you no longer have this problem, but I'll have a good headache trying to salvage the data from this POS. Obviously I will try a new type B cable first. The proprietary encryption you describe of the WD circuit board is indeed a terrible idea and serves no real data protection purpose whatsoever. Unfortunately many of these enclosures including most of the modern NAS have some type of proprietary BS on either the OS or file system making it almost never possible to put one of those disks in a hard drive docking station and simply retrieve your data. For this reason I mostly use regular hard disk docks, I bought a USB 3 pcie card and so I have upgraded my old pc to use this in combination with USB 3 SATA docking stations and I am quite happy with that; I also consider buying a SATA Hot-Swap Bay 3.5" -> 5.25" so I can leave a backup disk a little bit longer in my PC.
  8. This is very helpful. Thank you.
  9. any idea if this works for WD my passport external hard disk?
  10. Hmm I'm shocked that worked. I wonder if the same thing results hooking it up through the sata cable direct