Loose USB port on WD external hard drive

Hi,

I while ago I stupidly left the power and USB cables plugged into my 2TB Western Digital external hard drive when I moved house. 

Afterwards I noticed that the USB port had become loose and I had to push the cable in a certain direction to get my computer to recognise it. This made it looser over time and then it stopped connecting at all. So I decided to take it apart and it appears that the port has almost detached from the circuit board, which I’m assuming was why I had to move it around to get it to connect.

So the question is, if I just do some basic soldering to attach 3 of the 4 corners of the port back to the circuit board, will it start working again? I just want to take all of the media I have off it, but if I can salvage it to put back in the case and use again then that would be great too.

Thanks in advance

Sure it might work , However Notice the Following :

THE WARRANTY ON THE DRIVE HAVE BEEN VOIDED ! :(  ( OPENED THE ENCLOSURE )

2nd , i will Suggest to have a Data recovery company to fix / recover this for you , A Professional doing that will always be Better :slight_smile:

Thanks, I’m not worried about the warranty as I know it works, just a broken connection. I’ll try and get a quote from a recovery company but I guess any electronics place may be able to do it.

Importantly though, do you or anyone have any idea what data protection I have if someone was to fix it? I do a lot of illegal downloading and obviously wouldn’t want someone looking through my stuff.

Thanks