WD20SMZW debugging advice

[alobodig]

Hello HDD gurus,

I have a G-DRIVE Mobile USB-C external drive, which contains a Western Digital WD20SMZW. The drive no longer appears in Windows, Linux, or MacOS. Its USB interface still works and the drive returns a model & serial number, but then stalls when the OS tries to get a partition list. After about a minute it drops the USB connection and it no longer appears in device manager. The spindle is spinning and I hear the heads perform a couple of normal-sounding seeks.

I initially suspected a problem with the drive's logic board downstream of the USB interface IC, so to test this I swapped the board into in an identical drive (also swapping the BIOS flash chip) and it worked perfectly fine there. So the logic board doesn't seem to be the problem.

What would be the next step in diagnosing an issue like this? I've seen it's possible to tap into the SATA lines between the USB interface and on-board microcontroller, and use something like PC3000 to analyze what's going on one level closer to the action. Would there be an appropriate step before this?

(This is really just for my own education. Sending it out to a professional to recover the data would be my go-to otherwise.)

Thank you,
al

[crashpcberlin]

Those Drives are new WD-Charger Series with SED encrypted ROM and SA.

You'll need a unlocked SATA-PCB to do any further investigation steps with PC-3000 or any other tools.

[Dananjaya]

It must be a firmware error with few bad sectors.

You need unlocked pcb,like "crashpcberlin" said

[alobodig]

Thanks for the replies. I'll just wait until I have another failed WD charger drive before dishing out for an unlocked PCB.