Pocket hard drives · job notes · RDG-2025-2284
Five Goes, and Then Nothing.
Her last backup stopped part-way. She was moving house across Didcot to one of the new estates when the lead caught and pulled out mid-copy, and the drive then sat in a drawer through an entire winter: on it were twelve years of camcorder footage and her mother's albums, scanned a page at a time. In March she plugged it back in. The laptop still gives its bleep when I plug it in
, and Windows will offer safe removal and nothing else. No drive letter, not once. Then the detail that turned out to matter: it has five goes and then gives up
. Not four, not six. Always five.
Same fault on yours? Tell us what it is doing.
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What actually caused it.
Inside that small case there are two machines. The disk is only one of them. The second is a board whose job is turning it into something a USB port understands, and it has a processor, a little memory, and a view of its own on how well things are going. Here that board was in perfect health — which explains the bleep, the entry in the device list, and Windows cheerfully offering safe removal for hardware that has never handed over a byte. The half behind it never started. Firmware is allowed a fixed number of goes at getting the platters spinning, and once those are spent it stops rather than pushing current through a coil for nothing. Count the whirrs and you are counting spent attempts. That is not an error code. It is a limit, and you can hear it.
What this one needed on the bench.
How every job runs →| Bench tools | Its part in this job | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Ran the five attempts again on a current-limited bench supply, and read the trace off it | Gets into the manufacturer's own service mode, which plain ATA never reaches |
| DeepSpar USB Imager | Copied through WD's own electronics, so the hardware encryption never became an issue | Copies at full rate straight through the enclosure's own USB board |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Every folder was opened and looked at by eye, all of it against the completed image | Opens volumes other tools refuse: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs |
What the bench did.
One more start, this time watched on a current meter
One current-limited attempt on the bench told us most of what we needed. Five rises in the draw, each one the motor leaning on something that had hold of it, and not a thing in the trace to suggest the platters ever came up to speed. After the fifth, firmware stopped. Only a physical obstruction makes a spindle behave like that. What she had tried at home, as it turned out, had done no further harm.
Cover off, then free the heads
Under the lid, the rest explained itself. The lead went mid-copy, so the heads had no chance to park on their ramp. They came to rest on the platter, and a winter in an unheated drawer bonded them there. Each was worked free by hand, and each contact mark was inspected under magnification before any power went near the motor.
One pass end to end, through the board WD fitted
A My Passport keeps its encryption up in the USB board, not on the platters. That board therefore stayed in circuit, imaging hardware sitting behind it — exactly the route WD intended this data to travel. The copy then ran in a single pass, first sector to last, nothing skipped. A head that has bonded itself to a surface gets no second cold start from anybody.
What went back.
Everything came back — twelve years of camcorder transfers, every album page she had scanned, the lot. It went home on fresh media, with one thing said before it did: two copies under the same roof are not two copies. The Passport itself is out of service for good.
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