An external drive is three things in one case: a disk, a small bridge board translating it to USB, and a power path. Two of the three are not the disk, and between them they cause most of the failures — which is why so many undetected externals turn out to hold a perfectly healthy drive.
$ mdr diagnose /dev/sdb → Device: WD My Passport · 2 TB USB → Status: NOT DETECTED — USB board failed → Client: confidential · Manchester, Greater Manchester $ mdr engineer-working → USB board: repaired · drive healthy → Encryption: key preserved · unlocked → Imaging: 1.9 TB / 2 TB · 1sectors mapped $ mdr verify → ✓ photos — 24,800 files → ✓ documents — 11,200 files → ✓ drive recovered — data back
On most modern WD My Passport and My Book units the encryption key lives on the USB bridge board, so a bare disk removed from its case reads as unformatted even when perfectly healthy. Accepting Windows’ offer to initialise it at that point does real damage to a drive that was fine.
Any of the three can stop it working, and only one of them is the disk. That is why so many “dead” externals aren’t.
Each of these eliminates one of the three components above, and none of them can make anything worse.
USB cables fail internally with nothing visible on the outside, and the one that came with the drive is usually the cheapest part of the package.
Not through a hub or a monitor. A bus-powered 2.5-inch drive can fail to spin on a hub that cannot supply enough current, and behaves exactly like a dead disk.
Match the voltage and polarity on the label. A large share of apparently dead 3.5-inch externals are simply not being powered.
This separates a drive fault from a machine or driver fault in about a minute and tells you which problem you actually have.
Spinning quietly and never appearing points at the bridge, and the disk is probably fine. Clicking or scraping points at the mechanism — unplug it, and don’t plug it back in to check.
The disk inside is usually a standard drive; what differs is the enclosure around it and how it behaves when that fails.
WD — My Passport, My Book and Elements, including the hardware-encrypted models where the original bridge board must come in with the drive. Seagate — Expansion, Backup Plus and One Touch, portable and desktop. LaCie — Rugged, d2, 2big and the Thunderbolt units; LaCie designs cases rather than mechanisms, so the disk inside is generally a Seagate.
Toshiba Canvio, Samsung, SanDisk and Iomega also pass through regularly, Iomega despite the brand having been wound down years ago — there is no support to call, but the mechanism inside is ordinary. Multi-bay units such as the My Book Duo or LaCie 2big hold an array inside the case and are handled as array work.
The price is the same whichever of the three components turned out to be at fault.
A single external drive is from £300 +VAT, confirmed in writing after the free 48-hour diagnostic. Multi-bay and RAID enclosures are array work, from £500 +VAT.
Worth saying plainly: where the diagnostic finds a failed bridge and a healthy disk, that is a short job and we price it as one rather than charging a full recovery fee for something that took an afternoon. Where the disk itself has failed mechanically, clean-air work carries a 50% deposit with the balance due only on success. Send the unit complete — enclosure, cable and power supply if you still have them — to Peter House on Oxford Street, or post it insured.
Get the whole unit to us, and tell us a brief note on what happened. The diagnostic that follows costs nothing, and one figure goes in writing before any work begins.
Nothing starts until the whole unit to us — enclosure included is on the bench. Pack it properly and put your contact details in with it. The diagnostic that follows costs nothing, and one figure goes in writing before any work begins.
Posting it? Use something tracked and insured — whatever is on the drive is worth considerably more than the postage. Bringing it in? Weekdays, 9am to 5:30pm, and it still wants packing as above for the journey.
Not sure it is worth sending? Tell us about the drive and fault, plus anything already attempted — an engineer reads every one of these and comes back with an honest view of the odds and a price band, before you post anything.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 0161 871 0788.
The technical questions we get most about failed external drives.
Often not. An external is three things in one box — disk, bridge board and power path — and the bridge fails more often than the disk. A drive that spins quietly and never appears usually has a healthy disk behind a failed bridge.
No, especially with WD. Most modern My Passport and My Book units encrypt by default with the key held on the bridge board, so a bare disk reads as unformatted even when flawless — and initialising it then does real damage. Send the unit complete.
Unplug it and leave it unplugged. Clicking means the heads are failing or touching the platter, and each further power-on widens the damage. This is the one external fault where minutes genuinely matter.
No. That prompt means the partition table or file system cannot be read, not that your data has gone. Formatting writes a fresh structure over the one a recovery would use to find your files.
Usually a substantial proportion, and it depends almost entirely on whether it was running. Dropped while spinning, the heads can strike a surface they normally fly above and the damage is immediate. Dropped while powered off, the mechanism often survives untouched.
From £300 plus VAT for a single external, and from £500 plus VAT for multi-bay enclosures — fixed in a written quote after a free 48-hour diagnostic. Where it turns out to be a failed bridge and a healthy disk, we price it as the shorter job it is.
Send these complete rather than opening them. On several of these ranges the bridge board inside the case holds the encryption key, so a bare disk reads as unformatted even when it is in perfect health.
Names with an arrow have a guide of their own — brand-specific faults, and what they mean for a recovery.
£300 +VAT per drive, fixed in writing first. Send the unit complete with its enclosure — on a good many models the bridge board inside the case is the only thing that can decrypt the disk, and the case is the drive.