I have this WD 1 TB external hard disk since February, 2011 and it has been working fine until this second week of July, 2011. It stopped working when I switched on the power on the USB extension where the hard disk is connected after I had powered on my laptop.
Now, when I plug the external disk directly to the USB socket, Windows Vista installs it and says: “The software for this device has been successfully installed.” And when I click on this message box, 2 messages are in there: ”USB Mass storage device Ready to use” and “WD BAD PCB USB Device Ready to use”. When I go to Windows Storage Disk Management, this is what is shown: “Disk Unknown” and “Not Initialized”.
Since I am more interested in my data than on the warranty, I removed the enclosure, learning from my reading from community forums that connecting the disk directly to the internal SATA or IDE terminals of a desktop would help me recover my data. However, I could not find from Fry’s or from the internet an adapter to the exposed pins of the disk. A picture of my disk is shown below.
Thinking that the original cable may have been damaged, I tried using another similar cable but the result is still the same.
Can anyone please help me with my problem? Thanks very much.
Now, the disk can be connected directly into the pc, like a normal internal disk, but as you see on the picture, you will need a power wire and a sata-wire (usually I just borrow the ones for my dvd drive if I need to hook up an extra disk).
OR you could by yourself a seperate USB/SATA interface unit, they are usually very cheap.
Other than that, I must say that, even though MyBook units are cheap, they should really start to R&D their USB interfaces, some times I get the feeling that they are designed to fail on you, big shame on WD for bad quality control/design flaws/whatever the reasons are for their USB interfaces to **bleep** bigtime.
If this is a drive that came with Smartware the data will be encrypted by the board with USB port. Even if you get this working as an internal your data may b e useless.
Thank you very much, Knackerman, for your valuable suggestion. It is sad to know though that my picture could not be viewed by other members while it is viewable to me. I can only surmise that it is being edited for trade secret purposes. I appreciate your suggestion but your hard disk looks very different from mine. Two groups of pins are separated by the connector to the cable which cannot be detached from the board. One set has 2 pairs of 6 pins parallel to each other, and the other set is of 2 pins. I wish I could show the picture the way you showed yours. Could you tell me how to do it, so I can also post the picture the same way you did? Again, I appreciate your help. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Joe_S for your reply. I guess, you are correct because the USB port looks undetachable. Well, I was just hoping and wishing that I still can recover my data; otherwise, so be it.
