Question WD Hard drive recovery help

[scottineedhelp]

@fzabkar sounds like you’re the guy to ask. Okay here is my question/situation.

I have a WD 2007 Hard Drive my book. It’s a 1 TB. So it has two 500 gb hard drives in the enclosure.

I accidentally plugged wrong power supply higher amp output to the drive. It shorted the drive after about 10 seconds and powered off itself. Drive wouldn’t turn on again with original power supply. Extracted the hard drives from enclosure and plugged into external power. One of the drives drive A wouldn’t power spin. Drive B seemed to be fine. Couldn’t read from computer as expected.

Im trying to recover the data on the hard drive. I bought an exact hard drive off eBay to be a donor expecting that I could use the PCB and swap the rom/bios and then just plug into computer using external power and read and recover the data. These pcb boards don’t have a rom/bios chip.

I found that the TVS diode in the D4 position had shorter on the PCB using multi meter tool. I swapped out the diode from donor board with a functioning tvs diode. Tested the drive externally it spins and sounds good and normal. No odd clicking or anything still couldn’t be read from computer but couldn’t be seen.

My next step was just to put everything back in original enclosure and my hope was it would work again. So I put both drives A and B back in original enclosure and still I cannot get my computer to recognize and read like normal. It also seems the drives are turning on and off, on and off and not acting normal. It couldn’t read or be recognized in disk utility.

I tried putting both drives into the donor enclosure hoping it would work but that didn’t work either

So now I am stumped. Is there data on the enclosure that has bios or written authentication that could have shorter first before shorting on the pcb on the drive? Is that why it wouldn’t recognize and read in the donor enclosure?

What to try now? Do I need to use a recovery software? Like test disk to hopefully access and extract the data from the drives? Image first? I’ve never used recovery software before. The drives can be seen on computer just cannot be mounted. Anything that could be done to the original enclosure board to try to make it work?

Thanks I’m advanced!

Scott

I'm trying to upload pictures so you can see what I’m working with. Can’t do from phone will see if I can update.

 

[rgd1101]

upload image to imgur.com and post the link here

 

[scottineedhelp]

Here are pic of what I'm working on.

Thanks!

https://imgur.com/a/Ict5A1o

View: https://imgur.com/gallery/Ict5A1o

 

[fzabkar]

It sounds like you have a RAID 0 or a JBOD. Also, I think you'll find these boxes are hardware encrypted, so you will see gibberish when these drives are connected directly to your computer's SATA port.

Hopefully you did not permit your OS to write to the drives, as this will have trashed the partition metadata.

I would start by retrieving a SMART report from each drive. You could use GSmartControl (Windows and Mac).

Then I would examine sector 0 with a disk editor, eg DMDE (Windows and Mac). This will enable us to confirm the presence of encryption or otherwise.

As for why the drives are spinning up and down, it could be that the power adapter is being overloaded. Try spinning up each drive on its own inside the enclosure.

Other than TVS diode D4, another common failure is the 8-pin APM4532 power switch IC(s). Yours don't have visible signs of damage, but in any case, you say that both bridge PCBs are similarly affected.

Your bridge PCB has an Oxford Semiconductor bridge with an encryption algorithm that is not yet supported by DIY tools, or at least none that I'm aware of.