My Book Essential 1TB VCD No Longer Works

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

Hey everyone.  New to the forums here, but I’ll get right to it.

A couple of months ago, I asked my 10 year old son to setup my laptop on the kitchen table while I finished cleaning up after dinner.  Included in the setup was/is my WD MBE 1Tb External Drive.  Now, at no fault of his and certainly all mine, I did not double check him to make sure that he had everything plugged in correctly.  After playing on my laptop for about 2 hours, I  was abbruptly interrupted with a low battery warning.  I knew immediately what had happened.  My son had plugged my MBE power supply into my laptop and my laptop power supply into my MBE.  Nothing is wrong with my laptop, however, power is fried on the MBE.  Well, being the tinkerer that I am, I decided to take it upon myself to crack the enclosure and remove the drive.   Easy enough.  Now that I have the drive removed, I figured this would be a simple fix.  Plug it into a deskstop since its a sata drive, pull the data and then go from there.  But, not so fast, WD says.  Next option, buy an external HD Dock.  Simple enough, right?  Wrong.  Even plugged into a dock, I still cant access my data/files. 

I am currently using Win 7 64 Home Premium.  When I plug the dock in, Windows detectes that something has been plugged in, but it doesnt know what.  VCD does not start, and it does not show as a drive in My Computer.  However, when I go to Disk Management, I can see the drive.  Infact, it shows as 930g of unallocated space.  I know this is not true as my entire music library is on this drive along with 1000’s of pictures, customer data backups, movies, software installs and other misc stuff. 

So, you can see my delima.  I am thinking now, that I will need to purchase ANOTHER drive and set it up.  Once VCD is setup, crack the case, swap the drives and go from there.  But before I invest in another drive, I wanted to see if anyone had any other ideas.

Thanks!!

BCoop

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You are pretty knowledgeable about PCs so check this post http://community.wdc.com/t5/Other-Externals/Help-plugged-19v-into-my-1tb-WD-Elements/td-p/91237 and the other ones by fzabkar he seems really on top of these problems. Good luck!

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Thanks for the reply.  I appreciate the swiftness.  I should point out, I do not own, nor do I know how to use a Multimeter.  I never got that into the circuitry of computers and components.  I should also probably mention that I no longer have any of the bits and pieces from the original MB.  All I have now is litterally the drive it self.  Again, once I knew the drive was spinning, I trashed everything else thinking that all I needed was a USB connection to make it work.  However, WD is pretty slick in their ways and it is turning out to be no so simple.

Thanks again!!

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If the USB-SATA bridge board has an Initio INIC-1607E chip, as does P/N WDBAAF5000EBK (My Book Essential 500GB), then you will need the original board. This is because the data will be hardware-encrypted, whether or not you have specified a password. The Initio chip handles the 128-bit AES encryption.