Broken USB port on WD External Hard Drive

[rcd915]

OK so the usb port on my external western digital 1tb my book hard drive fell off last night. I took the hard drive apart. There is a case that attaches to the hard drive with a mini mother board which is where the usb port was attached. I bought a sander brush to clean the areas that have to be reattached. then I used conductive wirer glue. Don't know if I made a mistake by using this. I do not know what items to buy to soder, there were so many different grades of soder.
I have to leave this alone for 24 hours. I am hoping it works. If not, can someone tell me what grade of soder I need.
I must have 10000 pictures on this drive.

If this does not work, can you give me some suggestions. How about an enclosure. Help.

 

[CocoHacker]

Are you trying to connect it to a pc or laptop?

 

[CocoHacker]

1. If its to connect to a PC, just remove the 'mini motherboard' and then you have a standard SATA drive.

2. If its to connect to a laptop, remove the 'mini motherboard', use the respective enclosure (2.5 or 3.5) or a docking station.

3. Enclosures by Vantec gets the job done, though there are cheaper/fancier solutions too.

 

[fzabkar]

Try to get hold of some leaded solder. Post-RoHS solder is unleaded and melts at a much higher temperature. This makes it much more difficult to work with.

As for the USB-SATA bridge board, if the drive is an Essentials model, then it will be hardware encrypted, even if you have not set a password. This means that installing the drive behind an incompatible bridge will result in gibberish data.

Elements models are not encrypted, so they may work in a third party enclosure. However, even in this case you may not have access to your data if the original enclosure's firmware was configured with 4KB LBAs rather than the more typical 512 bytes.

 

[CocoHacker]

As for the USB-SATA bridge board, if the drive is an Essentials model, then it will be hardware encrypted, even if you have not set a password. This means that installing the drive behind an incompatible bridge will result in gibberish data.

Elements models are not encrypted, so they may work in a third party enclosure. However, even in this case you may not have access to your data if the original enclosure's firmware was configured with 4KB LBAs rather than the more typical 512 bytes.

Hmm ..... i guess i never came across an hardware encrypted drive before. Does the above apply for docking stations too fzakbar??

 

[fzabkar]

The data are encrypted and decrypted by the original My Book's bridge board. Unless you use a bridge board from a compatible My Book, the data will appear as gibberish. So a SATA docking station will not work for an Essentials drive.