I have a Western Digital My Passport Studio firewire/usb external drive which stopped being recognized on my mac. I've had it for about 4 years and it's always worked great. It sits on my desk next to my mac and has never been dropped or suffered any power surges. A couple days ago it stopped being recognized. I removed the drive from the enclosure. It's a Western Digital Blue WD10JVPT-22A1YT0 1TB drive.

When connected to a Mac:
and powered through the firewire adapter card, the drive will spin up, spin for a while, then power down.
and powered directly in a SATA enclosure, the drive will spin up and seems to keep spinning.
the drive is never recognized in Drive Utility

When connected to a PC (Windows XP)
and powered directly through SATA cable/power, it IS seen in the BIOS (screenshot attached) never seen in disk management.

when disconnecting all drives except this one and booting MDHDD, the drive is recognized in BIOS, but MDHDD won't boot saying "Drive is not ready."

Thoughts? Next step(s)?

Thanks in advance

Hi ncalsurfer! HDD probably has bad sectors or slow responding problem. Does Crystal disk info (https://crystaldiskinfo.uptodown.com/windows) see the HDD?

Best,

F

Could be a pretty simple solution (since no strange sounds or spin off).
But you need the right tools to handle this.

I'm sure that you can get you someone to solve that for you "cheap" in the US, as long as you don't make it worse...

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Try to read the drive's firmware resources (ROM and SA modules) using the demo versions of WDR or WDMarvel or HDDSuperTool. If it's a slow responding problem, then there may be an easy DIY fix.

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I tend to agree with "fzabkar" ^
Sounds like a slow responding problem
One thing though

Its not a DIY fix, it's more like a patch just enough to get your data out

Thanks guys! I've just got the kids wrangled and will run the suggestions and report back! Much appreciated!

So I tried the following:
WDMarvel - couldn't get the program to run. Sometimes it starts and will scan for drives, but typically the scan process results in major errors and crashes with a runtime error. I'll do some more investigating to try and get this to work properly.

WDR - I've downloaded a few different versions of this, but they all error out saying its not installed correctly. If someone has a link to a working version, I would appreciate it.

HDDSuperTool - I love command line, and this one can "see" the hard drive, but I get drive busy errors even after letting the drives seek for 15 minutes. (see screenshot).

The drive seems to be endlessly seeking and then every 3-5 minutes will "reset" with a click and start seeking again. Also, when booting into Linux for HDDSuperTool, it seems Linus is scanning the drive in the background and marking bad sectors. The first time I booted up, smart info showed 9 bad sectors. The second time after letting the drive spin for a while, smart info showed 45 bad sectors.

It's totally possible, even likely, that the drive has a single failed read/write head. I've seen several dozen cases where a WD My Passport would fully identify itself to the system, show proper capacity, but have no sector access because one of the heads had failed. If it's a system head 0 or 1, then it'll click. But if it's one of the other heads 2+ it may keep spinning normally and do exactly what you're seeing.

The bad news is, it's not a DIY fix unless you've got a clean room handy. The good news is, it's a very good chance that 100% of the data will be recoverable.

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Agree, see this nearly every day.

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That screenshot indicates that no drives are seen connected in direct mode, as indicated by the s=ff e=ff results (all pins are floating high). Is your BIOS set to IDE mode? It won't work with AHCI mode. Make sure your BIOS is set to IDE. And if your BIOS does not support IDE mode, try running HDDSuperTool without the -d option and see if you can get any results.

Not that it will help much if it has a bad head and no sector access...

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Thanks for the advice and suggestions. I'm fighting a little cold. I'll check BIOS settings this weekend and play around with some other items.

Along with requiring IDE set in BIOS, when using direct mode in HDDSuperTool, you will need to apply power to the drive after the computer boots up. That way Linux will leave the drive alone and you can work with it directly. Otherwise you will get an error that the drive is visible to the OS. But direct mode is the best way to work with a drive like this, so that the OS leaves the drive alone. If the drive is suffering from the slow issue, that is the best chance you have at any sort of DIY.

Also, I believe that WDR Demo and WDMarvel Demo are basically executable packages that will run from mini XP on Hirens Boot CD. I know that I have ran WDR Demo from Hirens Boot CD version 15.0 (it would not see drives with version 15.2). Just extract the package to a folder and place it on a flash drive, and plug it in after booting to the CD. But I don't use those tools much, so cannot be any more help than that.

If the data is important to you, then don't mess with the drive too much, as you don't want to increase the cost (and decrease the success chance) of professional recovery.

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