A joinery workshop in Thurmaston keeps its cutting lists, site surveys and photographs of finished work on a My Passport that travels between the unit and the van. It stopped being recognised by the office PC and could not be mapped at all. The owner had read enough to suspect either a mechanical failure or an electronic one, said so in his enquiry, and had also read that he should take the disk out of its case, which he had not done.
| Media | A WD My Passport portable drive that the office PC no longer recognises and which cannot be mapped at all. It holds cutting lists, site surveys and job photography for a small workshop. |
| What was reported | My Passport portable, dropped out of the office PC entirely and will not take a drive letter, the owner suspecting either a failed mechanism or failed electronics, cutting lists and job photographs wanted. |
| Fault class | Electronic. The drive's own circuitry had failed, so the mechanism never received a proper supply and the drive never presented itself to the bridge in the enclosure. The platters, the heads and the recorded data were all intact behind it. |
| On the bench | Profiled on a current-limited bench supply to separate an electrical fault from a mechanical one before anything was opened, the circuitry examined under a stereo microscope and the failure traced by current draw, the fault repaired with the drive's own memory chip retained so its calibration stayed with it, powered under supervision and imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA, the image decrypted through the bridge electronics that came with the case, and the volume parsed in R-Studio and sampled before release. |
His guess was a good one and still had to be tested. Mechanical and electronic faults produce the same symptom from the outside: a drive that will not present itself. They need entirely different work, and the wrong assumption costs either a wasted clean-air session or an afternoon of electrical testing on a drive whose heads are the problem. A current-limited supply separates them in a couple of minutes, because a stalled mechanism and a shorted circuit draw current in visibly different shapes.
Not being mappable is a stronger statement than not appearing. Mapping a network location is a different matter, but at the level he meant it, the operating system had no block device to work with at all. Nothing had introduced itself, so there was nothing to assign a letter to, nothing in the disk management list and nothing to attempt a repair on. That rules out the whole class of filesystem problems and points at the drive rather than the data.
Not taking the case apart was the single best decision in the job. On a My Passport the small board between the socket and the disk encrypts everything passing through it, holding the key itself. Reading the bare disk in a caddy therefore returns noise, and a case levered open with a screwdriver can arrive with that board cracked, which removes the key. The advice to shuck is everywhere and it is written by people who have not met this model.
Circuitry is repaired rather than substituted where possible. Every board carries adaptive data belonging to its own mechanism, so a replacement from another drive of the same model rarely works properly even when it powers up. Repairing the original keeps that calibration in place. Where a board is beyond repair, the memory chip holding the calibration is moved across, which is soldering work and is priced and treated as physical work accordingly.
Nothing was opened first. The disk came out of its enclosure and went onto a current-limited supply, where the current trace showed a short rather than a stall: the draw went straight to the limit with no attempt at rotation, which is an electrical signature and not a mechanical one. That single measurement decided the rest of the job.
Under the microscope the failed component was identified and the surrounding traces were sound. The repair was made on the original circuitry, with the drive's own memory chip retained so nothing about its calibration changed. Powered under supervision it spun up and readied normally. It imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA without a weak region, the image was decrypted through the bridge electronics from its own case, and R-Studio parsed the volume before a sample of surveys and photographs was opened.
The cutting lists, the surveys and four years of job photography all came back, and the drive itself went home working, though it was not recommended as anything other than a second copy from now on. The workshop now keeps the current job on the office machine as well as the drive.
A single disk is £300 + VAT. Work on a drive's electronics is named in the published exclusion, so the guarantee did not apply and 50% was payable upfront, with the balance once the recovered files had been checked.
You cannot tell from the outside and you do not need to. Both faults produce a drive that does not appear, and both are diagnosed properly in a couple of minutes on the right supply, so guessing achieves nothing except a temptation to act on the guess. What does matter is what you do while unsure: do not keep plugging it in, because if the fault is mechanical every attempt costs something, and do not take a My Passport or a My Book out of its case, because the key that makes the contents readable lives on the board inside the enclosure rather than on the disk. Send the case, the disk and the cable together, and if a caddy or an adaptor has already been tried, mention it.
Each of these is a real enquiry, taken from a household or a business somewhere in Leicester or the surrounding county, with the name of the customer, the firm and anything else that would identify them taken out. What is left is the reasoning: what turned up, what had actually failed inside it, the method that fault required and the equipment it was worked on. One of the thirty-six is a job that was refused, and it belongs here every bit as much as the successes do.
Beeping is a mechanism drawing power it cannot turn into movement
Silence after clicking is the drive giving up on schedule, not a second failure arriving
On a My Passport the key lives in the case, so the case and its cable travel with the disk
Examining it is free and takes 2 working days from arrival, the figure goes to you in writing and does not move afterwards, and a logical fault carries no fix, no fee. Start online or ring the freephone.