WD External Drive Stopped Working - Are there any Non-Destructive Diagnostic Options? What's the Best Course Of Action?

Question

I'm having problems with my Western Digital My Passport 4TB External Drive. This model, specifically: WDBYFT004BBK-0A

I was in the process of cross-backing-up data between my live setup (laptop), my other external drive (a Seagate) and the above mentioned WD. I started moving a large quantity of files (~40GB) from one ext drive to the other, left for a while, and when I came back the transfer had frozen and wouldn't continue, so I had to abort it. After that I removed the drives and reinserted them, but by then the WD stopped being recognized/read properly... Its LED would light up and/or blink, and I could feel the drive itself working (discs spinning), but it wouldn't show up in explorer, and if I tried refreshing the Disk Manager with it plugged in, it would freeze and stay stuck that way. The drive did show up in the device manager (in fact there were two entries, one for the drive itself and one called "WD SES Device"), but not properly (They would alternate between normal status and having the yellow warning sign indicating driver issues), and interacting with the drive entry would also lag a lot (ex opening properties). I tried uninstalling the drivers and letting windows reinstall them automatically, but that was 1st of all difficult due of the freezing and 2nd didn't seem to make a difference, even after rebooting.

I then tried using CrystalDiskInfo to check the drive's S.M.A.R.T. values, but it, too, had trouble detecting the disk. For some reason it ended up showing some data just as I was unplugging the drive*, that is, it urged caution, but the only problematic thing that I could see, was the "Pending Sector Count" (raw value of 2). I'm not sure if the software managed to properly analyze the drive or if it gave a partial result, though, since it seemed to be struggling.

At this point I realized that I had probably fiddled with the drive a bit too much already and might have inadvertently made the chances of recovery slimmer...

Keep in mind that:

1. professional recovery is not an option for me, regrettably, and
2. I don't consider the data on the drive truly indispensable. But I am still frustrated by not knowing exactly what was on it and what was properly mirrored on my other backup drive and what wasn't... So I'd still like to try to recover its contents, if possible.

I saw several people online recommending using (g)ddrescue on linux to create an image of the drive, and realized that that was probably my safest bet. So I got linux running on a live usb stick.

While I was familiarizing myself with the OS I tried just two more things, before stepping back to write this post, namely:

1. plugged the disk in while on linux to see if the os itself made a difference (it didn't. Or... well, the drive did show up in the Linux disk manager, actually. initially as a single free partition, which then changed to unknown. And the capacity was properly recognized, at least. But it still didn't mount/read properly)
2. I ran fdisk on it which gave the following response:

fdisk -l result

After that I stopped tinkering with it, but am still wondering whether there are any other non-destrictive diagnostics (like fsck -n, gdisk or badblocks maybe?) that I could run on it, to potentially simplify and accelerate the process a bit. Or at least a way to get an idea of how long imaging would take, with ddrescue. (I would also need to get another drive to store the images, if I went that route, which I'm not exactly looking forward to, but might be necessary...)

And, well, that's about it. What do you guys think? Is there anything I can and should do, before resorting to imaging the drive, or is that the only sensible option at this point?

For completeness' sake, I also tried:

• using another cable
• plugging the drive into another usb port
• plugging the drive into another windows machine I also wanted to try connecting the drive internally, via sata, so I took it out of the enclosure. But the only connector available is USB micro B, so that didn't work.

Thanks a lot in advance and best regards, Darko ^^

Answer 1

I can't give an immediate solution but I can recommend some things to try since I have had a very similar encounter in the past.

In my case the symptoms were that any application that tried reading my disk would stop responding. The reason for this was what I think was one of the partitions having a corrupted master file table. Windows would just freeze when trying to get anything related to the corrupted partition but it would eventually load the data on the other partitions after about 3 hours of reading the disk at 100% activity.

How I solved it was first by making a backup! On Windows you can use HDDRawCopy to clone a drive. If Windows crashes when reading the disk you'll have to get a live or a normal Linux installation to boot from. Then you can try cloning the entire disk (/dev/sdb or something like that) using dd or ddrescue like you said. ddrescue can continue cloning a disk that has for example a dead sector on which dd chokes and throws an error.

To recover the data after having made a backup, you should first of course run disk checks like chkdsk or Linux equivalents. If nothing works you can try using TestDisk. TestDisk is free and it allows you to analyse the partition table, file tables and even recover files and deleted partitions. If you're willing to mess with it a bit you can first scan the disk and partitions and see if everything is readable by testdisk. I fixed my problem by first writing down the offsets of my partitions shown in TestDisk, and then doing a deep scan for partition headers. Then I identified all the partitions that were important which were about 14 partitions and restored them. It didn't work first try but after trying some of the other similar offsets TestDisk had found I managed to get it readable again. If you really can't make the partition readable by Windows anymore you can try extracting the data. In my case I could actually read the hard drive just fine on Mac OS and Linux, it was just Windows that was having trouble reading one of the partitions.

Most importantly, there is no worries about your data if the problem occurred during a file transfer, it's very unlikely any data is actually lost. The most likely cause is some kind of corruption in the partition table or file table that makes Windows freeze. This kind of problem is not impossible to fix, it can take some research and time and a lot of troubleshooting, trial and error but I believe you can fix it.