WD My Book repair question

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

Hi everyone,

I have a 4TB My Book that smashed on the floor after falling off a desk. The outer casing looked unscathed and the drive itself still worked perfectly fine afterwards, so I sighed in relief and assumed it had survived the fall. When I used it again a couple of days later, I noticed that it suddenly had some difficulty loading files. To rule out my slow laptop being the culprit, I made a reboot, only to found out that the drive was no longer accessible. The computer still recognises the device when I plug it in, but the WD software (WD Security and WD Drive Utilities) doesn’t anymore. I need the software to unlock the drive, as it is password protected. I also think WD has standard decryption on it.

  • The My Book was unlocked at the time of the accident, but I don’t think it was busy processing.
  • When plugged in, I can hear it running/spinning. I don’t hear any ticking or anything out of the ordinary.

Given the fact that I’ve been able to use the drive normally aftwards, what are the chances that the hard disk itself is still intact and the problem is just the head? If the hard disk and encryption chip are both still intact, can the drive be repaired without having to move all the data to a new drive?

Any thoughts? Cheers!

Jack

2

If the drive was powered on and idle (not being accessed), it’s possible that damaged has occurred due to the heads making contact with the disk platter(s). However, if the drive was off or wasn’t accessed for a long period of time while running, the heads would have been parked off the disk platters, which would have minimized damage but would still pose a concern. Seeing that it slowly failed afterwards, my guess would be that a head and/or platter eventually wore out due to miss alignment, causing increased force on each other that lead to the damage.

3

Thanks for your feedback!

I guess it’s not as simple as just replacing the damaged head. It should be expected that the disk/platter is damaged as well. Although I hope it’s in good enough shape to recover the data on it. That being said, I have one more noob question: does the data have to be decrypted to be transferred to a new drive? I don’t necessarily want the Data Recovery Shop to snoop around in my personal data.

Cheers!

Jack