Data recovery for My Passport WD50NDZW with a broken USB port in Brussels
The problem
A Brussels client was working with her external drive plugged into her computer. Standing up, she turned too quickly: the cable pulled and the drive was left hanging from its connector. That single movement is enough to tear the USB port off the board. She first took the drive to a computer shop, where someone tried to reattach the broken connector with thin hand-soldered wires. The repair did not hold and the drive stayed invisible. Western Digital had offered to take the unit back despite the expired warranty, but her five terabytes of data would never have come back with it.
Our intervention
On this model the USB bridge is built into the board: there is no SATA connector, so the drive cannot simply be plugged in like an internal disk. First power-up on the PC-3000 Portable Pro: the unit started beeping, the signature of a short circuit. The shop's improvised soldering had bridged two points on the board. We removed what was left of the connector, soldered our own wires directly onto the board's test points and ran them to an adapter, which gives SATA access to a drive that has none. The ROM was then read and the drive unlocked under PC-3000, the board checked point by point to rule out any remaining short, and refitted. That left the decisive question: the state of the heads. They were intact.
Result
The failure was purely electronic: the heads and platters were untouched. That is why the invoice stopped at the electronics, less than half the cost of a mechanical recovery, and why 100 % of the data was copied. The client left with her drive, still intending to send it in under warranty.
Frequently asked question
My Passport WD50NDZW with a broken USB port: can the data be recovered?
On this model the USB bridge is built into the board: there is no SATA connector, so the drive cannot simply be plugged in like an internal disk. First power-up on the PC-3000 Portable Pro: the unit started beeping, the signature of a short circuit. The shop's improvised soldering had bridged two points on the board. We removed what was left of the connector, soldered our own wires directly onto the board's test points and ran them to an adapter, which gives SATA access to a drive that has none. The ROM was then read and the drive unlocked under PC-3000, the board checked point by point to rule out any remaining short, and refitted. That left the decisive question: the state of the heads. They were intact. The failure was purely electronic: the heads and platters were untouched. That is why the invoice stopped at the electronics, less than half the cost of a mechanical recovery, and why 100 % of the data was copied. The client left with her drive, still intending to send it in under warranty.
Related service: hard drive data recovery