Hi folks, looking for advice on recovery options for a Western Digital My Passport (2TB) USB drive. A colleague sent this drive to me.
Drive details:
Model: WD20NMVW-11W68S0
Date: 28 SEP 2012
PCB: 2060-771801-002 REV A
Symptoms and behaviour, from start of drive being plugged in (behaviour is the same, tested on both Windows 7 as well as FreeBSD):
1. Access LED is steady for about half a second
2. Drive spins up
3. Access LED blinks (LED on/off interval ~0.25s)
4. After about 10-12 seconds, drive emits a single click + audible "chirp" (sounds like actuator being forcefully reset or set to landing zone)
5. Access LED goes steady again
6. Access LED blinks (same interval as above)
7. After about 45 full seconds or so, #4 happens, rinse lather repeat #5-7. The access LED interval also sometimes varies.
However: between steps #3 and #4, I/O to the drive does appear to work. On Windows the drive pops up a warning about wanting to run CHKDSK (no way in hell am I doing that!) and a drive letter is assigned (not going to dare access that). I'm able to get full SMART attributes (provided below) during this time as well; ATA IDENTIFY commands as well work just fine (drive capacity, capabilities, etc.). But after #4, all I/O to the drive essentially times out, and eventually begins returning full SCSI sense data indicating a hardware issue (vendor-specific ASC/ASCQ).
The SMART data I can understand fully (trust me -- been doing this part of it for about 15 years now, quite familiar with ATA protocol as well) and see absolutely no anomalies, so I'm left thinking there is something more nefarious going on. (BTW, the SMART selective LBA self-test that didn't complete was due to me attempting to induce said SMART test; eventually something somewhere went into power save mode and hence the test aborted after several minutes. Also, the "SMART Status command failed" error is normal for smartmontools 6.4 via a USB/SAT layer; it's not indicative of a problem).
My gut feeling is that the drive locks up or begins misbehaving when trying to access some particular LBA (possibly outside the normal accessible region, i.e. internally used by WD for whatever) -- the fact IDENTIFY and SMART data can be obtained briefly, to me, is proof of that -- but then again I'm used to doing data recovery on PATA, SATA, and SCSI drives; this USB-only interface nonsense is making my troubleshooting efforts very painful.
I understand it's possible to wire up SATA XMT/RCV +/- to solder points E71 / E72 / E73 / E75, but this drive uses a JMicron JMS538S so odds are the data is AES-encrypted thus wiring that up wouldn't do me any good. And yes, I've read
the full PDF documenting circumvention and decryption, but there really aren't any tools out there for getting at any of the relevant data that don't require $3500-$10000 data recovery hardware/equipment.
I'm not sure if a PCB replacement (or SATA PCB replacement) + ROM swap would be at all useful.
Looking for advice on what to do.
If the advice is "get a DR company to deal with it", I'm fine with that, but after reviewing several of them the costs tend to be in the mid-to-high 3-digit US$ range, which is outside of said colleague's acceptable range (hence why he sent the drive to me). If there are folks here who do DR on these drives, are located in the US or Canada, and are willing to cut me a serious discount (I'm talking US$150-200 or so -- I can provide a target drive with same or larger LBA count), I'd love to hear from you.
Thank you!