Pocket hard drives · job notes · NTG-2025-2284
Five Tries, and Then Silence.
Her last backup never finished. A retired postwoman, she was part way through moving house across Derby when the lead caught and pulled out with a copy running, after which a drawer held it for the whole of the winter. On it were her mother's albums, scanned page by page, and twelve years of camcorder footage. Come the spring she plugged it in again. The laptop still bleeps at me when I put it in
, and Windows offers safe removal and nothing more. A drive letter never once appeared. Then the detail that mattered: five goes at it and then it packs in
. Not four. Not six. Five.
Yours doing the same? Say what it is up to — looking is free.
0115 8220606
What went wrong, and why.
That little case has two machines in it, and only one of the two is a disk. The other is a board whose entire job is turning a disk into something a USB port can deal with, and it has a processor, some memory and opinions of its own about how things are going. That board was in perfect health here, which accounts for the bleep, for the entry in the device list, and for Windows politely offering safe removal of hardware which has yet to give up a single byte of anything. It is the half behind it that never started. Firmware is given a fixed number of goes at getting platters turning, and when those are gone it gives up rather than send more current through a coil for no return. Counting the whirrs means counting spent attempts. None of that is an error code. What you are hearing is a limit.
The bench work this one took.
How the work runs →| Kit on the bench | What it did on this job | Why we reach for it |
|---|---|---|
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Put the five attempts through a current-limited bench supply, and read what the trace showed | Reaches the maker's own service mode, which standard ATA commands cannot |
| DeepSpar USB Imager | Imaged by way of WD's own electronics, leaving the hardware encryption out of the argument | Reads through the enclosure's own USB board at full speed, rather than round it |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Each folder was opened and inspected by eye, and all of that was done off the finished image | Reads APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs where other tools give up |
What happened on the bench.
One more start, this time with a meter on it
A single current-limited attempt on the bench supplied most of the answer. The draw rose five times, each rise the motor leaning against something that had a grip on it, and nowhere in the trace was there any sign of platters reaching speed. Firmware gave up after the fifth. Only a physical obstruction produces that behaviour in a spindle. As it happens, what she had tried at home had done it no further damage.
The lid off, and the heads lifted
The lid explained the rest. Because the lead came out with a copy running, the heads had no opportunity to park on their ramp. They stopped where they were, out on the platter, and an unheated drawer through the winter bonded them to it. Both were worked free by hand, and every contact mark was examined under magnification before the motor saw any power.
One pass, end to end, through WD's own board
Encryption on a My Passport lives up in the USB board rather than on the platters, so it was left in circuit with the imaging hardware behind it, which is exactly the path WD built for this data in the first place. One pass then took the copy from first sector to last with nothing skipped. There is no second cold start to be had from heads that have bonded to a surface.
What was returned.
All of it is back: her mother's album pages, twelve years of camcorder transfers, the whole lot. It travelled home on fresh media, with one remark attached — two copies under the same roof do not count as two copies. The Passport is permanently out of service.
Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.
More portable-drive jobs on the log.
Sounds like yours? Switch it off before anything else.
£250 + VAT covers a card or a USB stick; a single drive is £300 + VAT; RAID and NAS start from £500 + VAT. Nothing is charged for the first look, and a fixed figure reaches you in writing before any chargeable work begins. Switch the device off, leave it alone, and post it in. On most jobs, no data back means no fee.