I just wanted to show to you how we go about diagnosing hard drives so that we can understand what repairs need to be performed on the drive. The process of Data Recovery is in fact the repair of the failed WD My Passport drive so that data can be recovered.
WD My Passport hard drives are a popular make of drive and we have successfully recovered data from these drives over the years. Because these drives have a USB connection on the electronics of the WD My Passport they can give the appearance that they are working it is just that they are not being detected properly.
When diagnosing WD drives one of the first tools I go to is WD Marvell. In the picture below the WD Marvell app shows that no hard drive is detected over the USB connection indicating that there is a problem with the drive
Although the WD MY Passport remains undetected on the USB connection we can still connect to the MY Passport as these drives also have a serial interface.
The picture below is of a USB to Serial Converter so that the WD Marvell program can communicate with the WD My Passport.
We can now see in the picture the WD MARVELL program has recognised our WD My Passport and has extracted the model number in this case a WD10JMVW-11S5XS0.
The WD Marvell program also us allows to extract the ROM Bios from the original electronics which is vital if we are to diagnose the WD My Passport. It is always a good idea to examine the extracted ROM to ensure it is a valid copy.
Our extracted ROM can now be viewed MY Passport ROM .
We needed to do the above steps because the diagnostic tools I use require communicating with the drive over a SATA interface. see picture right
Now that we have the ROM we need to flash that ROM onto a sata equivalent PCB . By sata equivalent the sata board must the same Main MCU chip and the same Motor Controller.
We have now attached a sata PCB to our WD My Passport and flashed the original WD My Passprot ROM and we can see the drive is correctly recognized.
Unfortunately in this particular case the My Passport has a damaged read / write head and our best option is to replace the head assembly.
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