HDD Regenerator, which can be fairly adept reading a drive sector-by-sector and continually trying to read a "bad sector" until it finally does get enough right 1&0's to "refresh" the sector with the correct data. That ONLY really works for an "illegally parked head" If you have even a minor true hardware failure almost NOTHING will work with these 2 controller card, encrypted WD MY Books. YES, I will confess to having stuck a clicking clacking HDD (will not even identify itself to the OS) HDD in the freezer and gotten it to work-but don't count on that. So do keep trying-much better if there is NOT huge urgency and you can just every now and then give it another shot. Occasionally It's even the read/write heads locking or parking and NOT BUDGING-and sometimes they will inexplicably unpack themselves and you can be back in business. MANY times it IS one of the MyBooks 2 PCB cards that malfunction-95% of those times it will be what I call the External PCB which piggy backs off the drives regular PCB. NOT IN THEIR BUSINESS PLAN so don't even expect sensible advice from their techies-they have none (because they have ZERO experience) whee data retrieval is concerned. NOR DO ANY of the Manufacturers trouble themselves with any kind of data retrieval. Hong Kong IS supplying a lot of these (as well as PCB cards for most brands of drives-and AGAIN none of the manufacturers, Seagate (which has acquired nearly EVERYONE) Western Digital, Toshiba-NONE of them will sell you a PCB card-or any other "part" for that matter. I've been able to recover 3 seemingly DEAD WD MyBooks each for about $30-40 depending on who's got what cards for sale. Every possible number (serial model rev version etc) has to be an exact match. It MUST be the exact controller card for you drive's PCB controller.
You HAVE to order online from somewhere like EBAY because WD WILL NOT SELL YOU ONE. I can be pretty HANDS on and one solution that's worked for me is to replace the "External "2nd controller card. I've about 9 of the 3TB USB3 externals and I've run into read/write problems from time-to-time.
It encrypts EVERY THING written to these MyBooks. That's all well and good but the second controller comes with a HUGE Gotcha. That card not only makes these drives USB3 capable, it also greatly facilitates being able to format these 3TB drives to run on an OS like XP 32-which normally doesn't recognize 3TB drives. A PCB card which is more or less typical of any platter HDD but then a another controller that interfaces between the regular PCB and your USB connection. You're actually getting a lot of very LAME advise-no offense posters, advise here CAN at times be good.Ĭritical issue to understand with WD MyBook externals is that they have 2/TWO controller Cards.