How To Recover Lost Data From Latest WD USB3.0 Hard Drives

This is one real case study on how to recover lost data from Western Digital USB3.0 hard drives whose PCB number belongs to 1961 series.

HDD ID: 2.5” USB3.0 Hard Drive
Family-Null; Model: WDC WD20NMVW-11AV3S2; Capacity: 2TB
PCB: 1961

The engineer changed the 1961 USB PCB to 1933 SATA PCB and moved the ROM chip-U12 to the SATA PCB as well.

Connect the patient hard drive to DFL-FRP for WD, the drive got ready, entered the program, the hard drive was not detected. The engineer went to the module checking, and try to open module 11 directly but failed to read module 11. Then the engineer went to open module 01, the good news was that module 01 was opened successfully, the engineer select all contents inside and saved it as 01.rpm.

Next the engineer went to load the saved module 01 to RAM and then the engineer went to open module 11 again and at this time, the module 11 was read successfully and the user selected all contents inside and saved it as 11.rpm.

Next the engineer went to DFL-FRP for WD ROM operations, edited the head map and went to kernel mode to edit the DIR starting address. After the modification, the engineer powered off/on the drive again, entered the program by normal mode. Loaded module 11 and got hdd details, imported module 01 and then continued entering the program.

Next the engineer went to FW operations>Load Modules>Load Module 01 to RAMm after the loading success, the engineer went to use the common repair function-Slow Fix. Checked the log section and found the slow fix completed. Next the engineer went to change the DIR starting address and head map back to original.

Next the engineer powered off and on the drive and entered the program and was able to get the hdd details directly. After the fix, all the data is recovered by DFL-DDP USB3.0 data recovery equipment.