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My Western Digital 3TB MyBook Essential (Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)) made a knocking noise a couple of years ago during a Time Machine backup on my mac:

Time Machine couldn't complete the backup to "3 TB Scratch Disk". An error occurred while copying files.

So I ran First Aid in Disk Utility:

Running First Aid on "3 TB Scratch Disk" (disk452) Repairing file system. Volume could not be unmounted. Restoring the original state found as mounted. Unable to unmount volume for repair. : (-69673) Operation failed...

After a mac shut down, the drive wouldn't even be recognized. Neither my mac nor PC will recognize the disk as present. Recently, I built a dust-free enclosure. I opened up the drive and confirmed:

  • The heads are not stuck in the middle.
  • There are no visible scratches (on the top platter).

When I try to connect it to my mac (USB 3), I can hear it spinning, slowing, spinning, slowing... but the device is never detected in Finder or Disk Utility. On my PC (removing the outer circuit board and using SATA), it won't register either.

I'm wondering if buying a similar unit on eBay and transferring the external circuit boards over would help. Specific questions:

  1. Is it worth buying another 3TB MyBook Essential and transferring the external circuit boards over?
  2. Would it work to purchase any MyBook Essential and transfer the external circuit boards over? (e.g. a 500Gb model instead of 3TB)
  3. If not, what should be my next step here? The data is reasonably important to me, but not $1k+ important.
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  • My advise is to always buy a drive you actually want (with a 5 year warranty), and put it in an enclosure yourself. Most pre-built external disks use one of the cheaper disks in the companies lineup. you won't find a black or gold series disk in a prebuilt WD external. Second make sure that it is placed somewhere it can't fall or become damaged just from being there. I have heard of people replacing controller circuitry (and you already took the risk of opening the disk up [somthing I would never recommend]), but its a gamble both that it could solve the issue, and that you could pull it off.
    – Frank Thomas
    Commented Oct 4, 2022 at 17:50
  • as for your existing disk, I'd remove it from its enclosure, and connect it to an internal sata port. Then see if you can check the SMART stats to determine if the disk is mechanically healthy. if it is, then I'd try to image it with DDRescue, and then try testdisk to try to recover the partition, and failing that, I'd fall back to File Carving utilities like photorec. that said since the disk contains backups the data format is likely quite different than a standard filesystem, and may not allow file carving utilities to identify and parse the files.
    – Frank Thomas
    Commented Oct 4, 2022 at 18:03
  • Your disk is dead and it's not a matter of replacing circuits. You finished it off by opening it up.
    – harrymc
    Commented Oct 4, 2022 at 19:22
  • @FrankThomas Thanks, I should have mentioned: there is actually non-Time Machine content on the drive also. I was using it for both. It's the non-Time Machine content that I'm most concerned about anyway. I'll try your tips!
    – Mark
    Commented Oct 4, 2022 at 20:58
  • @harrymc Sure, it might be dead, but why not try? I did use a positive-pressure, dust-free enclosure when I opened it.
    – Mark
    Commented Oct 4, 2022 at 20:59

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