Case Study — Western Digital My Passport
Dropped, grinding, silent. Brought back and imaged.
A Western Digital My Passport Ultra 1TB arrived after an accidental drop, grinding and clicking on power-up. Here is how the recovery went, from diagnosis to a fully imaged drive.
The case
A drop, then grinding and clicking.
The drive was accidentally dropped and, from that point on, made noticeable grinding and clicking sounds whenever it was powered on.
Once a drive is clicking or grinding, there is nothing to be done with it at home — every extra power-on risks turning a recoverable fault into a permanent one. This one was powered down and brought to our Belfast laboratory for assessment.
What failed
Read/write head failure.
The noise and symptoms pointed clearly to a mechanical fault: the read/write heads had failed, almost certainly as a result of the drop. With this kind of damage, the only route back to the data is a physical head replacement — there is no software fix for a head that can no longer read the platters cleanly.
We keep heads for most common models in stock, including this one, which meant the repair could begin the same day rather than waiting on parts.
The recovery
From dead drive to secured image.
- 01
Cleanroom head swap
The damaged read/write heads were replaced with a matching donor set under cleanroom conditions — completed in around 30 minutes.
- 02
Bringing it back to life
The drive powered up again but was still unstable. Reads started as slow as 4MB/s before settling to well over 100MB/s — better, but the drive was still far from healthy.
- 03
Full imaging
With the drive stable enough to work with, it took a further four hours to image it in full, sector by sector, onto secure storage.
- 04
File system reconstruction
With the image secured, the file system was reconstructed from it to restore access to the folders and files.
The result
A dead drive, imaged and rebuilt.
What arrived as a dropped, grinding, unreadable external drive left the lab as a fully imaged one, with its file system reconstructed from that image. It is a fairly typical pattern for a drop-related head failure: a mechanical repair to get the media spinning and reading safely again, followed by the slower, more careful work of getting every sector off it intact.
Power it off and stop using it. An assessment will tell you exactly what has failed, what can be recovered, and what it will cost — before any work begins.