WD My Book Essential went bad... How to recover data?

[JonM81]

I saw a blog about the WD external HD having bad control boards and of course best buy and their geek squad were unable to help. In this blog I found, it showed that you could use a SATA cord and plug into your motherboard and retrieve data that way. I tried this and stole the power cord from my towered DVD-R and I did have a pop up notice that the driver for the ext. HD was installed. I did not, however, see the my book in computers (vista). So I tried to get into BIOS to make sure the SATA port 3 I plugged into was on but was unable to get to BIOS (see post in vista section, weird) so I stole the DVD-R's SATA cable and still nothing.

What should I try from here??

Thanks!

[DaveLembke]

Its more likely that this drive is dead, and the control board in the external enclosure for SATA/USB communications is fine.

If you removed the hard drive and connected it internally via SATA connection properly 1 plug for power and the other for communications ) and no drive is detected by the BIOS, then I'd say the drive itself is bad and likely not even spinning up. Only way to get data off this drive would be to send it out for costly data recovery.

[patio]

The known solutions will depend on if the MyBook software was used setting up this HDD initially or not...as there are 2 different methods...