I have a My Book Essential 3TB WDBACW0030HBK-00 that stopped working. I have it password protected using the WD software and I do in fact know my password. I removed the HD from the casing (removed the PCB attached board) and popped it into a HD external toaster. System “recognized” there was something attached but it simply won’t read the drive. In an attempt to read the HD, I made the mistake of using a partition utility to change it to MBR and it formatted my HD. Disk Management sees it as Basic NTFS and as Read Only. WD utilities nor WD Unlock recognize the HD attached so I don’t have an opportunity to unlock it with my password. I purchased a used donor WDBACW0030HBK-01 external HD with the hopes of using the PCB board/casing with my own HD. I suspect it won’t be that easy to expect my HD to be readable. I saw a YouTube video where someone swapped the ROM chip but not sure if that is required. I’m only hoping that I can recover my data using Disk Drill or another recovery utility. Guidance on this situation would be greatly appreciated.
Hi @FernandoDeanda
Have you opened a Support Case? If not opened, for more information, please contact the WD Technical Support team for the best assistance and troubleshooting:
I suggest you first reassemble your original hard drive with the donor PCB and use the WD unlocker software to unlock it. If it unlocks but is still unreadable, you can try Stellar data recovery free software to scan and recover the data. If this doesn’t work, you might need to swap the ROM chip from your original PCB to the donor PCB, which requires precision soldering, and I would say that for this take professional help.
