My Book 1.5 TB Broken USB Connector

[SeanyBoBorney]

I have a 1.5TB My Book, and until recently all was working fine.  A couple of days ago, however, I picked up my drive to plug it into my laptop and heard a rattling sound.  I then noticed that the USB connector was 'missing'.  Following advice from all the kind WDC members, I opened up the drive and could see that the actual USB connector had come away from the controller PCB.  Everything looks fine, no damage etc, so my first question is, can I re-attach that connector somehow?

A friend of mine has a USB 2 - SATA & IDE cable, so I borrowed that, thinking I could at least transfer some data off the drive while waiting for my work to issue me a new one.  However, when I plug it into Windows (have tried Win 7 and XP SP3), it does not show up as an available drive.  Under the drive management dialog, I can see that it shows as 1.5 TB of unallocated space.  Does this mean that I have lost all the data on my drive, or is there (PLEASE) a way to recover this data?  I am hoping there is, since there was probably around 1 TB at least full on that drive!!

I've tried disabling/enabling, power cycling, and all the 'regular' troubleshooting tasks, but I'm beginning to think that something has happened with the MBR on this drive - is it possible to repair this?

Thanks!!

[Joe_S · Accepted solution]

The board that the USB port broke off provides hardware encryption whether you set a password or not. About the only hope for data retrival is to see if you can find an electronics repair shop that can solder on a new port. If you have lots  of money you can try professional data recovery. If was a recent purchase and you want to gamble buy identical drive and try switching the boards. They are not interchangable because WD frequently changes them. People trying this have had very limited sucess.

Joe

[SeanyBoBorney]

Thanks Joe, that's what I was thinking (the soldering part) - I have some very important data on there so I've got to try whatever works and I'm quite handy with a soldering iron so I'm going to give that a go - I figure the worst that can happen is I end up with a drive I can't use - a replacement is already on the way so I really don't have anything to lose at this point.

[Joe_S]

If you look through the posts by fzbka he explains about these boards. I think he mentioned something about matching up numbers on them. It's not easy there are lot of posts. You also just learned not to keep important dta on just one drive.

Joe

[SeanyBoBorney]

Yes I did, and of course I don't do this all the time, but the one time I do I get burned - sometimes we've all just got to learn the hard way lol thanks again.