WD Passport HDD

[DT2]

Hi Guys,

Was wondering if you guys had done any data recovery on these drives. Primary interface seems to be broken, disk spins etc

onlooking inside, there appears a 12 pin connection - I take it this is WD's back door connection. Any ideas? - cannot mount the drive tried various utilities both linux and windows.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Darren

[newpersn]

Can u not take the drive and plug it in? 2.5" SATA drive should be in them?

[Arthur]

Getting data off of that HDD may be a problem.

[RabbieBurns]

I have taken a hacksaw to the casing and successfully recovered the data by plugging the HDD into a usb sata caddy as mentioned above

[EduTech]

I had one of these brought to me a while ago because it had a fault, I just took the case of and then connected the 2.5" Hard Disk to a computer and got the data off that way. I think a common issue is that the USB Connector becomes faulty.

 

James.

[newpersn]

I changed the usb lead on mine. Been working fine eversince. (that was over a year ago)

[mac_shinobi]

1. is the usb pcb board just plugged into the sata ( power and data ) connectors or is it apart of the pcb of the hdd itself ?

2. in the link Arthur linked to on a previous question it states about connecting it to another machine so I presume the answer to my first question is that its a small pcb board that connects to the hdd's sata connectors ( data and power ) so you could literally disconnect it and attach to another machine or use a hdd kit for sata power and data to retrieve the data assuming the hard drive was still in working condition otherwise as the suggestions using data recovery tools ie test disk, get data back etc

[DT2]

Ok, thanks for the replies.

But first of all, it isn't SATA, there's the standard connection - Mini USB which doesn't work, and when removed from the case there's a 12 pin connection - looks like half an old PATA section.

I've tried connecting to 4 different O/S's on all the disk spins, but nothing mounts - and even when i scna for partitions nothign is found. I suspect the USB interface is fubar, but unless there's a 12 pin connector out there somewhere there's no other way of connecting the drive.....

 

DT

Edited August 22, 2011 by DT2

[Achandler]

The passports have a horrible to get off plastic case, but you can remove it without damaging it.

 

They are probably 2.5in PATA drives, you can buy a connector to attach this directly to you computer (if you havent done already) this will that rule out the samll PCB within the Passport case. I then suggest you dowload Winhex and try to open it, using open physical drive, this can be done on the freebie version. If you can open it here then winhex will transverse your drive and try to show you the data. If you can see the folders then its good news, as you can recover then (but you will need a winhex license).

 

If you can't and the work on the drive is extremely important, then you can make winhex try to find the files using hex, I won't go into this further yet as you should defo try the above first.

[Martlet]

Hi

I also have this problem. How exactly did you connect the drive to the PC/Desktop? Did you use a

2.5" PATA IDE HARD DRIVE MOTHERBOARD CONNECTOR CABLE? If so where did you connect it to on the motherboard. I have also seen 2.5" to usb connector cables - would that work also?

[Dos_Box]

@Martlet: First I suggest you read this thread: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/hardware/79335-mayday-problem-usb-hdd.html

If this is the drive you have then you may be in trouble if you cannot connact via USB as the drive has a propriatary inteface. If you have an older drive with an IDE interface (lots of pins in 2 banks) but cannot see any IDE connectors on your PC motherboard, then this is becasue you have an up-to date computer and they haven't fittend them as they are 'old' tech and I would suggest you google for an IDE-SATA adaptor.