My Passport 2TB failed.... :(

WD External and Portable SSD Portable SSD
1

Hi

I bought a 2TB My Passport about 2 months ago and it seems to have failed already - doesn’t fill me with confidence should I decide to buy another WD drive - but that’s another story…

When I plug the drive in, I hear a bleeping noise, whilst the LED rapidly flashes.  After about a minute or so after the bleeping has stopped the LED flashes a lot slower.  The drive does not show up on my desktop, I have the drive formatted for my mac, but maybe I chose ExFAT…either way it still refuses to mount…

The drive doesn’t show up in Disk Utility but if I look at the info in System Information I can see the drive listed under the USB section. So at the very least it’s being reported somewhere on my machine!

If I plug the drive into my PC desktop, the same sequence occurs with the bleeping and LED flashing, after a couple of minutes I get the safely remove hardware icon in the taskbar which also mentions the drive name.  In the disk management utility I can see the drive but it won’t initialise which makes sense as it’s likely to be formatted with HFS - I do have Macdrive installed so that I can read my mac formatted drives however.

I’ve tried using the WD diagnostic tools, on the MAc version it shows the drive and lists it as 2TB and reports that it fails the SMART test.  I cannot however run ANY of the other tests, I click a test and nothing happens - I’ve left it for over 30 mins thinking it may eventually kick in…it doesn’t!

If I use the PC diagnostic tool, the drive is reported but lists it as 0TB and again none of the tests work…

I’ve read on a few sites that it’s possible to swap the interface card with another drive of the same capacity, of course that’s assuming that the drive itself isn’t the issue. I’m more than willing to buy another 2TB drive to do this if there’s a good chance that it will work - obviously the warranty would be void on both drives but that isn’t important right now.  I just need to get as much data off the drive as possible for as cheap as possible!

  I’ve also read that some WD drives have encryption, does this apply to My Passport drives?

Many thanks for any help!!

2

The My Passport drives are encrypted.

What you have described looks like a corrupted partition.

This could happen when a drive is been used across two different platforms like Windows and Mac.

See if you can get a Data Recovery application to retrieve the files.

3

Hi

This is going to seem a bit weird, the drive seems to have sprung back into life -, I took the drive apart to take a look and then ( I know I’ve voided the warranty in doing this!) plugged in the USB to make sure it still had the same symptoms. Just out of curiosity I gave the drive a brisk shake after 2 shakes it came back to life…I can only guess somehow something was stopping the heads from engaging?  In any case, it’s back working and I’ve copied off all the files that I needed.

I can’t trust the drive any more so I guess it’ll just sit on the shelf from here onwards…

Before all this I did try just about every data recovery app out there i could find, but as Finder couldn’t see the drive, non of them were of any use.  I only opened up the drive as a last resort just in case anything had come lose.  Looking back it probably wasn’t necessary to open the drive up…

4

Yes, it was really odd what happened.

Good to know that at least you were able to get your data.

Make sure to always keep a backup of your files as sometimes we learn the importance of this the hard way.