The yard manager of a plant-hire firm in Coalville kept one 2TB WD My Passport for everything: inspection records, delivery photographs, machine serial numbers, and a folder of photographs from a fortnight in Scotland that his wife wanted rather more than the inspection records. Plugged in, it made a small noise and then did nothing at all. It was quiet enough that he tried it perhaps thirty times over a week before he accepted it was not going to come right.
| Media | A 2TB WD My Passport that has stopped working, producing a faint noise when connected and never presenting a volume. It holds yard records, plant photographs and a set of holiday photographs. |
| What was reported | WD My Passport 2TB, stopped working, makes a small noise when plugged in, never shows up as a drive, inspection records and holiday photographs wanted back, tried repeatedly over a week. |
| Fault class | Mechanical. The head stack was failing rather than failed, producing a short quiet seek and no successful read, so the drive never readied. Repeated attempts had begun to leave light marking on the outer region the drive returns to first. |
| On the bench | Set aside unpowered on arrival, taken from the enclosure and given one profiled start on a current-limited bench supply, opened under laminar flow with heads and both surfaces examined under a stereo microscope, matched donor heads fitted and alignment set, imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA with the marked region deferred and revisited on a narrowed head map, the image decrypted through the bridge electronics that arrived with it, and the recovered folders parsed in R-Studio and opened before release. |
Loud faults get respect and quiet ones get retried. A drive that grinds or knocks frightens people into stopping. A drive that makes a small sound and does nothing sounds like a connection problem, so it gets another go, and another, and by the end of a week it has been started thirty times. Every one of those starts is a failing head crossing the surface, and the damage is cumulative in a way the noise does not advertise.
What the sound actually was. The head assembly moved a short distance, failed to find what it needed and stopped. There is no successful read anywhere in that sequence, which is why nothing ever appeared. It is the same fault as a loudly clicking drive at an earlier stage, and catching it earlier is worth a great deal, since the surfaces have had less exposure to a head that is not flying properly.
The week of attempts showed on the platters. Under magnification there was light marking on the outer band, which is where a drive goes first when it starts. That band held part of the volume's own indexing, so it had to be read carefully and slowly rather than skipped, and one small area of it never came back at all. Had he stopped on the second day there would have been nothing to report here.
The enclosure mattered as much as the disk. He sent the case, the disk inside it and the lead, which on this model is not optional: the board in the case holds the key that makes the contents readable. The disk had to come out for the head work, but the board went back into the process afterwards, and without it the recovered image would have been two terabytes of noise.
It was not plugged in at any point before the bench. A single profiled start on a current-limited supply showed a spindle at proper speed and a head assembly making a brief movement with no read following it, which is a head fault at an early stage rather than a motor problem.
Under laminar flow, three of the four heads were degraded and the outer band showed the light marking a week of attempts had produced. Matched donor heads were fitted and alignment set. Imaging on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA took the healthy regions first and returned to the marked band afterwards at reduced speed with the head map narrowed, which recovered most of it. The image was decrypted through the original bridge electronics, R-Studio parsed the volume, and the folders were opened rather than counted.
The inspection records and plant photographs came back complete. Around forty of the holiday photographs sat in the small area of the outer band that never read, and those were reported honestly as gone rather than padded out with damaged files. Everything else was returned on fresh media.
A single disk is £300 + VAT whatever its capacity. Clean-air head work sits outside the published guarantee, so 50% was settled before the drive was opened, with the balance falling due once the recovered folders had been checked.
Treat a quiet fault with the same caution you would give a loud one. The temptation is to keep plugging it in because the sound is undramatic, and that is precisely how a drive with a fortnight of life left in it gets used up in a week. There is nothing to be gained from another port, another cable or another computer once the drive has failed to present itself twice, because the part that has failed is not the part any of those talk to. Software will not help either, for the same reason. Leave it alone, send the whole enclosure with its lead so the case electronics travel with the disk, and say honestly how many times it has been tried; that number changes how the imaging is ordered.
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.