Hi, new member here, ive read plenty of information on wd’s community and I figured it would be my best shot to get some help/info so I can hopefully recover data from this drive(WD50EZRZ- pulled from enclosure after not recognized) I thought maybe it was just the enclosure(WDBFJK0050HBK-04) so I shucked the drive and unfortunately it was dead and would kill the external reader immediately. I did some more research and found out about TVS diodes and after a little bit more research I took the multimeter to the HDD PCB and found that D4 was shorted to ground. I tried to find a match for D4(ON semiconductor 6AK RE43) but could not find an exact match so I went ahead and fired up the hot air rework station and removed D4 and checked the drive was at least spinning and it was! Finally some progress, but now the next hurdle was windows couldn’t detect a filesystem and wanted to initialize so I immediately disconnected the drive figuring the data would have a better shot at being recovered if needed. After some more reading I found out even if you don’t put a password on these devices they are hardware encrypted and require the USB/SATA Controller from the enclosure. The only issue is this controller does not allow the drive to spin up and was told it smoked when the wrong adapter was plugged in. The computer seemed to recognize the controller but the drive did not show at all. I tried to find a schematic but there’s limited info on the hardware so I figured the best shot at this point was to order a controller replacement(board imprint- 4060-705149-000 Rev A) and in the meantime get a backup of the drive using a newly setup linux desktop with ddrescue. What I need assistance with is when the new controller comes do I just need to move U2(ROM)or is there any other components that need to be swapped? Fzabkar seems to know these devices better than most and am hoping might see this post and can help me either diagnose the original controller or verify swap will allow decryption with the replacement board(matches board imprint but not exact match)
Sorry for the long description but that’s been the journey so far, if anybody can help I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you!
UPDATE
For anyone else who might run into this, it turns out this specific model had the asmedia asm1051w on the controller which lead to the discovery that the encryption on this drive is actually just the controller adjusting the sector size(from 512 to 4096 on the fly to allow older systems like xp to see larger drives)
The data was still fully intact but being read incorrectly by anything but the usb/sata bridge controller. What I ended up doing to get the data off since I still do not have the replacement bridge controller yet, was to analyze the cloned disk using testdisk in order to find the file system and then I was able to navigate through the files and was able to copy all of the readable data from that cloned drive to another external drive. There may be a better way to do this but that’s what worked for me. Hopefully this helps someone, I know I wouldn’t have been able to figure it out without all the helpful information in the forums. I’m still going to order the replacement 12V TVS diode WD suggests and I will update my post once I get the bridge controller in and verify if it will simply read the disk or if the ROM will need swapped also.
