Western Digital WD My Book Desktop External - Hard Drive Data Recovery

So today we're going to be working on a Western Digital four terabyte hard drive that was removed out of this Western Digital My Book you've probably seen these commonly in online retailers or maybe in your local store they're very common today you plug this into your laptop or computer and you're able to access the hard drive that's inside of it so this is the actual hard drive that was inside of this Western Digital My Book A lot of people don't realize but essentially this black casing that you purchase is just a normal three and a half inch internal hard drive that's connected to one of these external housings or casings that you then connect with a with some form of power supply and typically a SATA or USB cable to your computer in this particular case the customer did let us know that the hard drive was not powering on so after a storm had occurred the customer stated that the next morning he went to turn on his computer to access all of his business files and the hard drive was not connecting to the computer and in which case he went and noticed that their the lights seemed to be different on the WD my book at XI repair we know that from doing thousands of these exact data recoveries that most cases any power related issue is going to be with a fault with the printed circuit board so first what I'm going to do is I've already taken out this hard drive from its casing so that we can test the drive ourselves and the customers a concern was correct the drive itself did not power up so we're going to look at this printed circuit board so in almost all cases it's going to be an issue with the printed circuit board so we need to First diagnose that issue by removing it all the important components they control the power are on the other side of this printed circuit board and so we really can't do any proper Diagnostics without removing it these four screws will be removed and it looks like we have a stripped one I'm not sure if the customer has attempted to do this himself or not but I'm going to switch the view around so that we can actually you guys can actually see for yourself this stripped screw so you can see right there this screw is definitely not in good shape I'm going to put one of the other screws back in so you can compare what it would look like if the screw was in good shape so you can see here a little bit of a shadow but it's a perfect um six point star which is the type of connector that we're using here it's called a Torx screw but over here and the star as well not much of a star anymore so I've used the safest method possible so far to try to remove this screw and for the life of me it will not come out um I am not exactly sure why this screw is being so stubborn but it is so we're going to resort to some Extreme Measures now we have this very small Dremel I apologize the noise for the noise in advance but we're going to do some surgery here essentially what we're going to do is actually cut off see if we can cut into this screw so here we go I need a little more taken off all right there we go so now we got it so as you can see I'm able now to twist this screw out safely without damaging anything it does take a lot of pressure on my hand but now we've got this screw out safely all right so that screw is definitely no good now if you notice there's no damage so that's a good thing say I'm going to clean this up a little bit just get those little pieces of metal there we go and you literally cannot even tell that we did anything to this um when you do this enough you can get good like that to where you don't have to worry about damaging the PCB all right so we're going to set this hard drive to the side because it's no good if we can't get it powered on and now we're going to do a visual inspection of this PCB so we're just going to look around and see if we see anything that jumps out at us we're looking for any components that maybe look like maybe they got too hot or I've become detached so nothing major yet to do is test these diodes this is what most commonly goes out in my experience so we're going to put this in diode mode we're going to test each one of these diodes so I'm getting good readings on all of these diodes um this is the power connector right here so this is the area that we're really concerned about on the board it's possible for it to be shorted elsewhere but nine times out of ten it's going to be one of these resistors or the diodes so next thing we're going to do is to test the zero ohm resistors so it's good good now this is what I was afraid of with this one um no obvious signs of damage we could go a lot further on this board but it would be much more practical to use what's called a donor Drive so this is a donor drive here you can see I've already got it labeled here this is one that I know is working well so what we're going to do here is we have our original PCB that's not working and we have a donor PCB that is a very very close match in order for us to do this successfully there is this very small chip it's called a u12 ROM chip essentially this controller has to be functioning in order for the drive to um in order for the drive to get the data if this controller trip is wrong for example if I took the one from the donor board and put it over here even if this PCB was functioning the data would not populate and you would not be able to remove the data from this hard drive so first thing we're going to do is label them if you haven't already and my case already have so I am going to come down here and I'm going to remove this chip now we noticed that this little dot corresponds with this dot on the PCB itself so that's how we'll remember the orientation which for which the controller chip should be placed when we return it now to make this process simple I like to add a little bit of solder it's going to make removing the chip safer so essentially we just want to add some solder to each one of the legs and I'm really not worried about bridges right now even though I need my tip to heat up more because we're just removing it you can see how much more solder is put on us doing this so this is going to allow us to remove this with a lot less Force so next we want to carefully heat up this component where we place heat is important because we want to preserve this donor board because we need this board functioning once we put on the controller the customer's original controller chip are you I.E we also want to stay away from melting any of the plastic and just like that we can pull away we're going to set that controller I see to the side as well as this PCB now what we're going to do is actually um first I'm going to clean up before I'm going to do this I'm going to go ahead and clean up these pads you can see this one right here still bridged there we go that way when I immediately when I remove the controller chip from the customer's original or we can easily just swap it without me having to set it down it's going to make the process simpler so I was just noted before it's the same orientation and it's really important if you do attempt to do this yourself which I would not recommend if you're not a professional you do have to make sure that the pcbs match and there's a lot of information you need to know about in order to match them there are certain numbers on the back such as the PCB board number there's different um rev numbers it'll say rev a A or R E V A B A lot of times these numbers need to be very close if not matching entirely for this process to work just like that I removed my original controller chip and I'm going to bring this back and put this in place so we're going to heat this up and then we're going to slowly set this in we have to be very careful not to damage any other components so it's a little more flux there we go and we notice how that time it just went right into place now one thing we can do to really just make sure it has a good solid connection is go back and touch it up this would work and as you could tell it looks just like it did from the factory but there's nothing wrong with making each one of these connections A Little Bit Stronger and as we notated earlier the dot as you can see on that far right top right corner matches with the dot on the board all right so now we're going to just clean this up a little bit it doesn't have to be perfect because we need to really just test this all right so what we're going to do now is reconnect this new donor board with the customer's original hard drive just gonna clean this Flex off my working area this is the customer's original Drive I'm going to flip this over and we're going to screw in the customer's new donor PCB and because that one screw was stripped obviously we can't return that so I'm just going to be putting in three they just have to the PCB just has to make a connection here on the back side of the hard drive so this should work fine all right so now what we're going to be doing is we're actually going to be taking the hard drive which is here that we just repaired and we're going to be connecting it to this machine here it's a very fancy data recovery machine so we're going to be taking the hard drive that we just put the new pc donor PCB on and we're going to be connecting it to this fancy rig this is a deep Spar Imaging system and this allows us to do a lot of data recovery operations on these drives it's very helpful in these types of situations this particular machine does not actually have a power button so um I use a metal stick like this to short the power pins the power connector pins and it will turn on like that voila you can see the fans spinning this one will start spinning in just a second and now the software will pop up on this monitor all right so now that our deep star Imaging system is up we're going to type in this command prompt a lot of the commands for the software is through command prompt all right so we have a destination Drive plugged in behind this machine and we're going to press f11 to actually power on this drive and we're going to see if we get power so it's actually spinning now look at that we have power foreign so this is exactly what we're looking for you can see now we have the source drive and this drive is actually physically spinning all right so now that we know for sure that the customer's Drive is working which is a really good sign we're going to actually start Imaging it so this particular tool is is uh was developed by some very smart computer engineers and what it does is it allows us to image this drive regardless of the condition of the data so a lot of times if you have a hard drive that's corrupt or has other issues and you plug it into a Windows machine it'll just sit there and chug and chug and chug and chug you've probably noticed this yourself especially if you're watching this video and this tool allows us to bypass a lot of those issues and errors that you might come into it allows us to directly image the drive so as we can see here the Deep smart Imaging data recovery system is Imaging the device block by block sector by sector and so far we haven't had any bad blocks as you can see in the bottom right hand corner right here this is the time that it's going to take for this system to run now a lot of times especially when these drives are not into good good condition and if they've already had issues most of the time they're not in great condition the the pro the time that it can take to image is going to be a lot slower another thing that we may see is the higher capacity drives are obviously going to take longer and this is a four terabyte drive but so far you can already see here that we have 66 documents 816 photos 31 different types of media this information is very valuable and we have barely gone through even one percent of the drive so so far we've already got a good bit of the customer's data back and by the end of this 13 hours we should have almost all of the customers data back so stay tuned all right so now that the device has the drive has success fully imaged to our known working hard drive we're actually going to connect this hard drive to an external reader all right now that we've got our drive connected to our external reader we're going to come into our studio obviously we do not want to format the drive now this particular drive we can see here the Deep smart image automatically populated and this is essentially a clone of that WD My Book all right this is just a clone of it now that we got it working we wanted to transfer it to a known working hard drive and now we want to analyze that data so in some cases if this does not automatically populate if you are using a program like rstudio you may have to you may have to assign a disk drive letter which you can do by looking up Drive management and you can see here that it will give you an option to right click on these drives and click change Drive letter now sometimes you'll have to add one for it to automatically populate on your computer it just kind of depends on how the settings are set up so we can see here that the customer's partition did successfully image so what we're going to do is do a scan so we want to scan we're going to do detailed we're going to click scan now this is going to take quite some time these are these are different sectors in here and we can see as it goes one by one just like on the Deep star imager it's going to go block by block by block analyzing every portion of the data this is a very very very powerful data recovery tool that also connects directly with that deep star imager so this is going to help us make sure that we get all of the customers data back and possibly even things that were deleted so we're going on a little bit over an hour of this recovering all of the customers data as you can tell we're a little bit over halfway through and we'll be back shortly to finish it up this was just a very large Drive almost four terabytes of data that is being recovered so it's taken quite some time so now that all the data has been recovered we can open up the file explorer and we can see here all of the customers data that's been recovered so we successfully recovered a total of 225 gigabytes worth of data 68 000 files and 2400 folders so this customer should be very happy with the results of getting all of their data recovered [Music] thank you

Channel: XiRepair

Views: 2,561

Keywords: Data Recovery, External Hard Drive Data Recovery, Western Digital Hard Drive Data Recovery, Western Digital My Book No Power, wd my book not working, wd my book disassembly, wd my book 4tb repair, western digital hard drive repair, Western Digital Hard Drive Repair, WD Hard Drive PCB repair, WD My Book No Power Fix, How To Fix WD My Book Hard Drive, my wd hard disk is not detected by computer, my wd external hard drive is not showing up, My external desktop my book is not working

Id: B2G5NZ51aus

Length: 23min 15sec (1395 seconds)

Published: Tue May 16 2023