Is drive toast?

Vertigo

Vertigo

Vertigo

Soldato
Joined
28 Dec 2003
Posts
16,294
Hi all,

Got an old WD My Passport external 2.5" USB3 drive. Was working fine last time I used it but now it's not.

The drive spins up and is detected (USB plug-in sound), however it's protected by Bitlocker and this takes a good 30 seconds to prompt for the password. Once entered, it then just sits there and never gets any further.

Is this more likely to be the actual disk or a logic-board issue? It hasn't been dropped or mishandled in any way since it was working.

I'm presuming it's toast?
 
When connected, it takes about a minute to even show up in Explorer or Task Manager. It then does and prompts for the password, at which point it shows up in task manager and the graph shows 100% utilisation for the past minute.

Enter the password and it goes back to 100% utilisation and then just sits there forever.
 
Hmm, so I left it for like 10 minutes after entering the password. The prompt finally disappeared and the padlock icon changed to an unlocked one. At this point Explorer was trying to scan the drive but this eventually failed with a "device unavailable" error.
 
Tested it on other pc/devices?
But wouldn't be the first external I have had
That wouldn't work over usb
But taking it out the casing
And connected directly to motherboard worked fine
Obviously not every drive can be removed
And connected directly to motherboard though
 
Yep tried it on multiple devices - same result.

From what I can gather, the board on this drive has a built-in USB interface, it's not an adapter so can't connect it to SATA.
 
Vertigo1 said:
Yep tried it on multiple devices - same result.

From what I can gather, the board on this drive has a built-in USB interface, it's not an adapter so can't connect it to SATA.
Click to expand...
That's unfortunate
Not sure what else you can do
Maybe ask in wanted section?
See if anyone has same sort of external
And try a transplant?
May be more bother than its worth
If its not critical data
 
Yeah I thought about trying to find a matching used one and swapping the circuit boards as a hail mary but, from what I've read, you'd need to swap chips on the boards as they're tied to the drive.

Not worth the effort.
 
Vertigo1 said:
Yeah I thought about trying to find a matching used one and swapping the circuit boards as a hail mary but, from what I've read, you'd need to swap chips on the boards as they're tied to the drive.

Not worth the effort.
Click to expand...
Yeah had someone on here recently
They managed to find someone
To swap the chip on theirs which was very lucky for them
But their data was important
But not backed up sadly
It's probably not worth the effort for non critical data
Especially given the prices of replacement drives
Pretty cheap to just get another external
 
Have you tried to do a chkdsk on it? Open powershell as administrator and try chkdsk volume: /f /x /r where "volume" is the drive letter.
 
Nah nothing sees it. It does show up in explorer and, after a very long wait, appears to unlock but at that point no app can even see the drive letter. Trying to access it at a command prompt just gives "device not ready".
 
Yeah I've given up. It's kind of frustrating because it is recognised and can be unlocked, albeit very very slowly, and you can hear the drive spinning and it at least trying to access.
 
sounds like youre at the point
where running diskpart clean or clean all
might be worth a try doesnt look like you would be able
to copy everything off it anyway
if it even shows in diskpart
not used mechanical drives in years
but assume there should be some sort of manufacturers software
with drive self test
and maybe low level format or other tools in it too
 
Final thing to do maybe is to take the drive out of the usb enclosure, connect it direct to motherboard and run Victoria on it. Victoria being a hard drive fixing/recovery tool which seems to have some notoriety.
 
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