The WD My Passport external hard drive is an extremely popular type of external storage device in Ireland. Made by Western Digital Corporation, these portable USB (2.0, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2) drives come in a variety of colours and sizes. Popular capacities include 1TB, 2TB, 4TB and 5TB. However, like any type of storage media, My Passport disks can fail.
Here are the main reasons:
- Bad Sectors
Your WD My Passport may fail due to bad sectors. These occur when areas of the disk platter become unreadable. While almost all disks have some bad sectors, which can be managed by the disk’s firmware, some bad sectors cannot be remedied by the disk’s firmware. If these sectors contain user data – it can result in the data becoming inaccessible. Or, if bad sectors develop in the System Area of the drive (where firmware modules are stored) or where MFT (Master File Table) information is stored – this can also result in inaccessible data.
The Fix: The bad sector problem can be mostly solved by using specialised data recovery equipment which is designed to read and re-read damaged sectors at an extremely slow speed and in very small sector sizes.
2) Lost in Translation
Like all hard disks, your WD My Passport uses a process known as File Layer Translation to translate logical addresses to physical addresses. (Basically, your file system stores data logically and uses FLT tables to translate these logical areas to actual physical sectors on your hard drive. Hard drives use this process because it makes file storage more efficient.) However, sometimes, due to underlying disk problems, the FLT table goes corrupt which means your disk can’t find the data.
The Fix: Any underlying disk problems such as bad disk-heads or bad sectors must be resolved before the FLT can be read properly.
3 ) Oops…Accidental Deletion
If you’ve accidentally deleted data from your WD My Passport disk, you’re not alone. Every year, scores of computer users in Ireland accidentally delete data from their disks. This is often due to the distractions of multi-tasking. Confusing one disk for another is more common than you think.
The Fix: Assuming you’ve not over-written the data with fresh data, your data should be recoverable. This is because, like with any HDD, when you delete data from a WD My Passport, it is not actually deleted. The area of the disk is simply marked as “free” but its data is not actually deleted until you write new data to the disk.
4) Accidental Drop of your WD My Passport
One of the top reasons why a WD My Passport disks fail prematurely is because the user drops it. Even a small drop from a coffee table can result in your drive’s disk-heads incurring damage. In the worst-case scenario, the heads can scrape against the drive platters causing irreversible damage.
The Fix: In most cases, the only fix for this type of problem is to bring the disk into a clean-room and insert a new head-disk assembly. In a small minority of cases, the disk-heads can be remapped by manipulating the disk’s firmware, but this methodology will not always be successful.
5) Accidental Liquid Spillage on your WD My Passport
You’re having a nice relaxing cup of coffee. When reaching over your desk to reach over to pick up yesterday’s unread newspaper, that cup of Java decides to capsize spilling its contents all over your desk and onto your hard disk.
The Fix: Any liquid like coffee, water, beer or tea getting into contact with your disk’s PCB (printed circuit board – the electronic board just inside the plastic casing of your disk) can cause corrosive damage or pre-amplifier failure. This means that the components (such as diodes and resistors) on the disk’s PCB can get corroded by the liquid – a process which sometimes takes weeks. If you’ve been very unlucky, the liquid spill might have caused a power surge to occur inside your disk causing its pre-amplifier chip to fail. The first problem can be fixed by fitting a new PCB or by component level repair. A transplant of the EEPROM chip from old PCB is needed. If it’s the pre-ampflier chip which has failed, this usually means a new head-disk assembly. Both fixes are usually successful in getting your WD disk working again.
6) Spindle Damage
The spindle motor plays a crucial role in spinning your disk platters at 5200 RPM. Most modern My Passport disks use a Fluid Dynamic Bearing (FDB). This is a highly sophisticated mechanism which has to spin the platters at a constant rate but also in a way to minimise NRRO (non-repeatable run off errors). If the spindle motor is even a nano-metre off kilter, it can result in bad reads. However, sometimes, after a knock or fall, the spindle motor will seize. This is because a) its herringbone bearing inside the motor will seize or b) the lubricating oil inside the spindle motor chamber leaks out due to shock damage. The latter process is usually invisible to the naked eye.
The Fix: A special hard disk spindle replacement tool has to be used to extract the old spindle and replace it with a new mechanism. This is a delicate procedure which has to be performed in a clean-room. In most cases, it results in complete data recovery of your WD My Passport disk.
Drive Rescue, Dublin, Ireland offer a complete data recovery service for My Passport disks which are not showing up in Windows or Mac, which are appearing at not initialised, which are generating an “access denied” error message or disks which are not mounting. We recover from all My Passport models including Passport for Mac, My Passport Ultra, My Passport Slim and WD My Passport Go SSD.