How to Recover Data from a WD Hard Drive Not Recognized

hey everyone it's Eric here from laffix back out again we've got another video for you guys today today we have this nice it's a Western Digital elements it's a USB um external drive here I'd probably get one of these big old boxes too man and even the customer brought in a big old box for this and it's a three terabyte drive that we have here it's for data recovery and obviously it's a really nice drive it's very convenient for people maybe it's not really super on the go they even show it as right next to like a desktop or something but it's nice to have all your data really on one drive um but there's a problem with it and we need to see what's going on the customer can't access their data so what happened there who knows but we're going to experience that today right we're going to be seeing what's going on see if we can get the data so we have one of these drives now inside one of these drives I actually did take it out um before we even really go crazy with it right you always want to take it out of one of these because inside one of these little compartments is usually right it's not just a separate USB drive that's in there I showed another video just removing it doing it that way especially if that's an easy problem you go ahead check that one out that's more of an easier repair more of a basic thing the best case scenario for something like that it's very lucky is that because there is a separate PCB board in there that connects right so inside one of these when you take it up you actually see this and this is where I show another video is that there's a separate PCB board USB connection board right it's a connection it's just a like a pretty much like a dongle or an adapter it's to connect for USB right and there's a power there's USB and sometimes this can fail it's very common for it to fail too especially if it's who knows because right there's a whole board on here there's it's doing lots of things right so there's you know capacitors there's power flow there's data there's lots still going on there they can fail so I'm going to try to go ahead and remove that first that's the most important thing because you want to work your way from the easy way to the hard way right and now we're here and we have this one of these drives there's a three and a half inch drive that's in there that's connected to this and we want to see what's going on they're normally formatted as more of like an ex-fat Drive which is going to help for compatibility for Windows and Mac we're going to go ahead and see so let's see what the symptoms are when we plug it in do have like an external sled here let's just see the symptoms of it to see what's going on see what we have here so I do turn it on I'm just going to plug it in my Windows machine just to see if there's any symptoms or see if it turns on what's going on there so I can feel it spinning okay we heard the windows um if Windows Explorer noticed it right so it must be good right right that's why they're here but let's go ahead let's go ahead and see so I'm gonna bring up this right screen cap oh I don't really see anything here right we just see these are our normal drives there's nothing there but we can go ahead and recently check um Disk Management because yeah let's go ahead and Check Disk Management and we bring this up here and we actually don't see really anything right there's nothing there whatsoever let me cancel this because I don't I think everybody had it open sometimes you need to refresh it sometimes it might actually show something right so if I connect here nope nothing so just our basic drives here we have room ones okay so we did try on our Mac and we got the same thing how it didn't actually come up whatsoever um so it looks like there's a problem with identifying the drive itself there right no for software it's not going to work so we need to do some some Hardware work on it right well next thing we want to do is we want to take a look at the drive and on the drive right you see something else there there's a PCB and man we love motherboard repairs we like doing any type of work with a PCB so let's go ahead and maybe that's the problem there right so let's go ahead and take a look at that first okay so it's really easy we can lift this up there's a separate board there there's also other connections there sometimes if they're damaged or something or uh the pad's actually really good this is a little bit of a foam pad it's really good because if you see there's like an obvious burn on there you would obviously see it from there oh this looks like to be pretty clean um but here we go so this is where the PCB is we can see that um let's go ahead and take a look at it under the microscope to see if there's any obvious damage anything that that's really just stands out all right so we have this under the microscope and the first area we want to check is because um the first area we want to check right is the power in area because this is where it is right so there's a static connection here we got power and data line and that's where it's coming in from right so sometimes if it's coming in there it's starting there maybe there's a fault there or for some type of fault for recognition there right maybe those bone capacitor maybe some of the pins can get damaged they're really easy for that to happen and we don't know exactly right you always like to ask questions for the client to see exactly what happened there if it's a physical drop or something to make it a little bit more obvious or or that but we're looking here the pins look to be actually okay um yeah don't really see anything super obvious there let's go ahead and check just do a quick scan sometimes you can see this this is another connection um and these actually do connect to the drive itself these little bit of pads here and sometimes these can actually get a little bit damaged or something and or just a little bit dirty or something like that right so what you can do is actually if you have like an eraser or something you can actually have have that handy and you can actually sometimes just change this little bit of a color here right because it's sometimes it can get a little bit discolored and it's not going to breed properly right because these need to be all at least very good to read nothing looks to be ridiculous here but sometimes just doing this can help a little bit more see if you do on the edge one here right you see how it's lightened up a little bit there's only so much this can do but it's usually more for if there's like if it's very obviously the connection the one in the corner looks to be a little bit bad but that's probably okay because you can see the main little pin in the middle there on the on the top left one you can see it that actually is making contact it looks like it was making contact fine I'm gonna go ahead and look around scan the board see there's anything out of place damage capacitors something blown liquid spill something right and it doesn't really seem to be a case all these pins actually look to be okay here okay so this actually looks to be good so since we didn't see any obvious damage and again we didn't hear any click noises or anything else going that way we're gonna still blame this to be the problem right maybe there's a problem with it recognizing there um maybe there's something corrupt there who really knows maybe there's damage to it there you can measure it we can obviously do that as well or we can show you guys some fun stuff because we are also day Recovery Center we also have like donor drives and part of these donor drives sometimes they're going to be a little bit different but maybe the drive might be a little different but sometimes the PCB can actually be the same so we do have this PCB here it looks very identical to our other one right so we see it here almost to the same exact thing even though it's a completely different Drive whatsoever I think that one's like a NAS drive too but it looks to be the same on both sides it's really important to to try and match these up always best you can especially for certain ones a lot of a lot of times Western Digital especially the newer one supposed to do it could be encrypted so there might be like some type of MCU encryption which makes doing work on it all the more fun let's say for you guys so for this one it's a little bit of an older one it looks like I think this drive was from 2014 but it's a three terabyte drive so what we can probably do is we just want to test the theory of it because we know this is a working drive that we have here what what if we can just say hey you know what we think the drive is physically good but there might be a problem with this board here and there's no obvious damage nothing there but what we can do is we can just swap them right so if we swap them then what it should just work right right out of the box just swap them no it's not going to work that way because if we work that way what you will probably do is you'll probably get power you'll probably get recognition there but how is the drive going to locate the data and it does that through something called a bioship and it's going to help locate the actual data on the drive here so let's go under the microscope we'll actually show you that it's a little chip that's on the bottom well that's a good one for next to where the connection is over here so this chip here and let's just we need to replace them we need to swap them because that's the whole point right so let's go ahead and do that and let's go ahead and then try it out and see if it's going to work so we want to be careful removing it it's very delicate so we're going to loosen it up first a small Spike true right okay there we go so we replaced the bioship there let's go ahead plug it in and see if the behavior changes in any way all right because we're expecting to now um because we believe there is a problem more with the board itself and just doing this simple swap on there which hopefully should be good enough so let's plug this back in let's put the screws back on so our Drive looks to be good and let's go ahead and plug in a PC 3000 and see what happens now we're gonna bring up our pc2000 software we can go ahead and activate the utility there and we see we're getting our Drive information which is really good we're gonna do a little bit of work on it and then we can actually go to data extractor here and we actually see that there is partitions if we go down here we see this x fact Drive and here's the data anyways guys I hope you guys enjoyed watching this video on doing the data recovery for this Western Digital elements three and a half inch drive if you did please leave a like religious help slot subscribing more content we do lots of data recoveries we do liquid silver pairs boil over repairs PCB repairs you name it so hope you guys are watching take care bye

Channel: lapfix

Views: 15,271

Keywords: how to, recover data, wd hard drive, not recognized, western digital drive, western digital, western digital external hard drive, western digital external hard drive not working, not detected, hard drive not recognized, exfat, pc-3000 data recovery, wd elements external hard drive, western digital my elements, 3tb wd drive

Id: lm8lFaa2z50

Length: 11min 6sec (666 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 02 2023