What I believe happened is that when I tried to hook this drive up to my new USB hub, the hub sent to much juice to the drive, causing the circit to fry. Or the drive is just old enough that it crapped out on it’s own.
I then tried to hook it up to multiple Macs and started getting an error messages saying:
“To prevent damaging your computer, the USB device drawing too much power has been disabled. Other devices may have also been disabled. When you disconnect the device drawing too much power, your other USB devices will be enabled again.”
At this point the drive was vibrating and the drive appeared to be spinning. The drive eventually stopped spinning at all, the blue light on the drive was solid when the USB cable was connected.
So I tried a bunch of things:
Other Micro USB cables
The charger stand that came with the hard drive
A PC, iMac, MacBook
2 other USB hubs; one powered, one not
Hooked it up to a wall outlit to see if the drive sounded like it was spinning
Ordered a Y-Cable, but don’t think that is going to help
Nothing has worked, so I opened the drive up and found the fried chip. My question now is, is my data lost forever OR can I still retrieve it somehow? Maybe buying a new PNC board and moving some stuff over? I’m no electronics genius, but can follow steps if available.
Really need the information off the drive, can someone please help me out. Thanks in advance. Hope this post proves useful for others.
When replacing the PCB, you need to transfer the 8-pin Winbond flash memory IC at location U12 from patient to donor. This chip stores unique, drive specific information. You may or may not need to transfer U14 as well. The latter stores the USB-SATA bridge firmware.
The following PCB suppliers include a free firmware transfer service:
The Initio INIC-1607E chip incorporates AES hardware encryption, so if your data are garbled, then U14 would need to be transferred (AFAIK).
If your Passport is an Essentials model, then it will be encrypted. If it’s an Elements, then it won’t be encrypted. In the latter case you may be able to replace the USB PCB with a compatible SATA-only PCB, but you will still need to transfer U12. There are several threads at HDD Guru that discuss suitable SATA PCBs.
When you get this PCB, you need to move your original PCB’s BIOS to the replacement PCB. You can move the BIOS from your original PCB by using hot-air gun, then solder it on the replacement board. Please refer: http://www.datarecoveryunion.com/hard-drive-rom-chip-swapreplacement/. Or you can find the electronics repair shop to help you
