Mechanical noise
Clicking, grinding, scraping. The heads or the motor. No amount of software addresses this, and every minute of scanning costs surface.
Power off
If the drive appears in Disk Management and is not making noise, you are in the territory where read-only software works. If it is silent, clicking, or vanishing on and off, you are not — and the difference matters more than any tool.
Copying off, imaging and read-only scanning cannot make the situation worse. Formatting, chkdsk, initialising, and installing recovery software onto the drive itself all can, and routinely do.
One test, and it decides whether anything below is worth attempting.
Recovery software reads. It cannot repair a mechanism, revive a controller or reach a drive the computer cannot see. So the question is simply whether the drive is presenting itself and behaving while it does.
Safe to attempt: the drive appears in Disk Management, stays connected, makes no unusual noise, and the problem is a missing partition, an unreadable file system, deleted files, or a format. Those are logical faults on working hardware, and read-only tools resolve a great many of them.
Not safe: any clicking, grinding or beeping; a drive that mounts then drops off; a drive absent from Disk Management entirely. In those cases scanning is hours of load on hardware that may not survive it, and drives routinely die partway through a scan intended to save them.
The single most damaging thing done to externals, and it is done with good intentions.
Most modern WD My Passport and My Book units encrypt their contents in hardware, whether or not anyone set a password. The encryption key lives on the small USB bridge board inside the enclosure — not on the disk itself.
So taking the drive out and connecting it directly, which works fine on many other brands, presents a disk full of ciphertext. Windows reads it as unformatted and offers to initialise it. Accepting that damages a drive that was healthy, and the original bridge board is now the only thing that can decrypt what is on it.
If you have already shucked a WD drive: keep the enclosure and the board, do not discard it, and send it in with the disk. Without it, recovery is materially harder and sometimes impossible.
Break any of these and you can turn a recoverable situation into a partial one.
The installer writes, and it may write into the free space holding your files. Use a portable version from a USB stick if you can.
Never write recovered files back onto the drive you are recovering from. That overwrites the space still holding everything you have not retrieved yet.
Anything offering to fix, repair or rebuild the drive is writing. Scanning and carving are read operations; repairs are not.
New noise, slowing scan, disconnections during the scan. Those mean the hardware is deteriorating under the load, and continuing costs more than stopping.
Because the drive has to be readable before any tool can begin.
Clicking, grinding, scraping. The heads or the motor. No amount of software addresses this, and every minute of scanning costs surface.
The disk is fine and the interface between it and USB is not. Common on externals, and it requires reaching the disk another way.
The drive spins and reports nothing, or reports an absurd capacity. It cannot describe itself, so nothing can read it conventionally.
WD units where the enclosure has been discarded. The disk is intact and the key is gone with the board.
If it appears in Disk Management, stays connected and makes no unusual noise, then often yes — read-only software handles missing partitions, unreadable file systems and deleted files well. If it is clicking or dropping off, no.
Not on a WD unit. Most modern My Passport and My Book drives encrypt in hardware with the key on the USB bridge board, so a bare disk reads as unformatted even when healthy — and Windows then offers to initialise it.
On a different drive than the one you are recovering, or run a portable version from a USB stick. The installer writes, and it may write into exactly the free space holding your files.
No. Writing recovered files back onto the source overwrites the space still holding everything you have not retrieved yet. Always recover to a third location.
No. Stop immediately. A change in behaviour during a scan means the hardware is deteriorating under the load, and continuing reduces what can be recovered afterwards.
Mechanical noise, a failed bridge board, firmware or controller faults, and hardware-encrypted WD drives whose enclosure has been discarded. In all four the drive cannot be read conventionally, so no software can begin.