I have a Western Digital My Book Essential 2TB External Drive P/N WBACW0020HBK-00.
I had an unfortunate incident where I grabbed the wrong power transformer cord and applied 24 VDC to the drive. I smelled something burning and saw a nice little glow from the enclosure vents.
I’ve done quite a bit of research, and read many posts, on similar issues with this WD drive. The closest similarity to this problem was frequently explained by fzabkar and others.
This is what I found. When removed from the enclosure, and the bridge board removed, the drive will power up, via a Cables to Go USB cable, and I can hear the disk motor spinning. So I presume that the drive’s TVS diode is OK. There are no visibly burned components on the drive’s PCB. Under Windows Disk Management the drive shows up as unallocated and it asked if I wanted it to be initialized. Knowing that it would wipe the data I wanted to recover, I just exited the software and powered down the drive.
There is, however, a visibly burned IC on the bridge board. The board carries the sticker P/N 4061-705089-001 Rev. AG. The back of the PCB is screened with the number 4060-70589-001 Rev. P1. The burned IC is U5 near a large coiled inductor. The chip is marked RT8284GSP. This IC turns out to be a DC/DC converter. The RT8284GSP is supposed to take up to 25VDC on its input pin, but it is visibly burnt and obviously failed. But maybe its failure saved the TVS on the HD controller board?
I purchased a used P/N 4061-705089-001 Rev. AG bridge PCB. In all external physical respects and part numbers this board is identical to the PCB bridge board on my My Book Drive.
The replacement board alone, not connected to the hard drive, is identified in device manager and the LED lights up. When the replacement bridge board is connected to the hard drive and then to my computer, the bridge board LED lights up, blinks a few times, and the drive spins up also. Windows identifies it as a My Book in the Safely Remove Hardware app. The drive is not recognized by Windows File Explorer, however, but Windows Disk Management still reports it as an unallocated drive that is not initialized.
I’m guessing that it is not recognized because the drive is encrypted by WD. I was hoping that the identical bridge board, as I’ve read elsewhere, could possibly make the drive functional again and decrypt the data.
I welcome any ideas on what to do next in hopes to recover my data. Thank you.
