Case Study
A dropped My Passport, clicking on arrival. 99% recovered in four hours.
A 500GB Western Digital My Passport arrived at our Belfast laboratory clicking after being dropped. Here is how a same-day head swap got 99% of the owner's business documents and photos back.
The case
A drop, a click, and a decision to open it up.
The drive: a Western Digital My Passport, 500GB, dropped shortly before it stopped working.
The casing came off first, so the drive could be inspected properly rather than guessed at. Spinning up, it clicked — the standard sign of a damaged read/write head, and normally the kind of fault that means an expensive repair before any data can even be looked at.
Our first move on a case like this is always to try imaging the drive as it is, without opening it, to keep costs down if the mechanism will allow it. Here it wouldn't: the imager could not gain any access through the damaged heads. A physical head swap was the only way in.
The recovery
Donor heads, a clean swap, a straightforward image.
- 01
Imaging attempt
Before opening the drive, we tried imaging it as-is to avoid unnecessary cost. The damaged heads gave the imager no usable access, confirming a physical repair was needed.
- 02
Donor head swap
WD My Passport drives are common enough that we keep donor drives of this model in stock. The heads were swapped under cleanroom conditions — a delicate procedure, and one where the true extent of the damage is only clear once the drive is actually open.
- 03
Imaging
The transplant went cleanly, and the drive began responding well to imaging straight away. A handful of bad sectors from the drop turned up, but nothing serious enough to threaten the recovery.
The result
99% of the data recovered, same day.
Imaging took around two hours once the head swap was complete. From drop-off at our Ormeau Road laboratory in Belfast to a confirmed result, the whole case took four hours.
We recovered 99% of the drive's contents — the owner's business documents and photographs intact, with only the small number of bad sectors caused by the original drop left unreadable.
See our hard drive data recovery page for how we handle clicking and dropped drives generally, and what's typically recoverable.
Power it down and stop using it. Tell us what happened and an engineer will give you an honest view of what's recoverable and a fixed quote before any work starts.