Is drive toast?

Vertigo

Vertigo

Vertigo

Soldato
Joined
28 Dec 2003
Posts
16,295
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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