Diagnosing WD7500 My Passport

[oakland14]

Hi all,

I am new to the forums here.
I have a fairly new 750gb WD My passport 2.5 inch drive, already extracted from the case. I'm trying to recover the data and ran across an oddity that I have not experienced. The drive has the USB only connection, which appears to be functioning fine, and when plugged in does become recognized. Windows xp assigns it a drive letter, but its properties shows it as 0 bytes used and 0 bytes free.

It does not show up under administrative tools at all. My forensic tools can see the physical disk, but when opened it cant read from any sectors, including 0-63. It also fills in all sectors as "UNREADABLE SECTOR".

I'm not quite sure what to think. I know how to bypass the USB and make a SATA connection, and I also have a SD WD doctor at my disposal. The owner did not have the encryption set, but from what I read it may not matter.

The drive has not been dropped, and just stopped working oneday.

Could this going to be a physical problem on the board, or a problem with the Service Area?

The drive will stay spinning for awhile with the light always on, but eventually goes to sleep.

I don't want to start swapping chips and carving this thing apart before getting a starting diagnosis point.

[einstein9]

WD My passport

means needs a Pro. Diagnose which u need here

[jono-ats]

Unless you're "lucky" enough to have something simple like a bad solder joint, your best bet would be to send it to a pro if the data is important.

Or practice with your friend's Salvation gear until you get a fundamental understanding of what's going on, before you get started. Don't expect to "get it" in 24 hours.

Even so, it's way too complicated (and perhaps irresponsible) to answer your question in a forum venue. WDs are sometimes hard even for the pros.

Good luck.

[oakland14]

The gear is all mine as I have used it before, so I do have the experience of using it.

I post as I want to learn as much as possible and not make the mistake of browsing the web to find the wrong answers. I have spent quite some time on these forums looking at various posts and determined there are a lot of intelligent people that I can learn from. The reason I post is I don't want to send it to the "pros" as I want to deepen my knowledge pool and fix problems such as this as I will surely get more requests.

I don't want to overlook anything, even things that may seem apparent.

[einstein9]

Good Luck man

[jono-ats]

Have you tried Salvation Data's tech support forum?

I don't use their gear, so I can't be of much help.

[oakland14]

I know how to use their equipment. I was just hoping to get some input on the problem before I dove too deep, but I got it figured out. Data recovered, thank you.

[harddrivespecialist]

I don't want to send it to the "pros" as I want to deepen my knowledge pool and fix problems such as this

I would suggest to start practicing with less complicated drive than this one.