WD My Passport Hard Drive failed with important pictures

WD External and Portable SSD Portable SSD
1

I hve a client that had a large number of pictures on his laptop and was worried about something happening to them should his hard drive crash or the laptop dropped.

I recommended that he get the WD my pasport hard drive and do regular backups.

After a couple years  he got into the habit of bacing up the pictures and everything was copied to the passport drive and suddenly the passport drive has failed It won’t even power on, except for random instances lasting 5-45 seconds.

One such instance lasted long enough (with a couple pauses) that I was able to run a chkdsk on the drive and it didn’t find any data corruption.

It seems that the board that the drive i attached to is bad.

I also couldn’t simply hook it up to another machine via a sta cable because of the unique adapter interface it uses.

So at this point I have a client that I recommended use the WD passport drive as I usually do and now he is stressed out and worrying about losing all of his family pictures.

Are there any recommendations for repairing this or recovering the data off of it?

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If it it’s the board then this might help

https://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/70/session/L3RpbWUvMTM5MDMyNjIwNS9zaWQvZVBrTU9YS2w%3D or try finding a board on Ebay. This explains a little about the boards  http://community.wd.com/t5/Off-Topic-Discussions/Bridge-Boards/td-p/353839  You should also explain to your client that a backup means 2 copies not simply moving data to another drive.

Joe

1 Like
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I agree, he’s not that computer savvy and  I think he put a lot of faith into the external drive. He now has two of them for redundancys sake (as would have proven valuable here). I was however contacted by WD support so hopefully we can figure something out to get the pictures for the guy. I was thinking about swappingthe board on it as well, but I wanted to exhaust other options first as I didn’t want to potentially cause damage if other options are available.