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HDR / The work we take on / Western Digital drives

Specialist · Western Digital drives

Western Digital recovery in Hull. A My Book, a My Passport, a bare Blue or Red — each is a different problem.

Most of the WD units opened here are externals: My Passport, My Book, Elements, the odd Easystore. The disk inside is an ordinary one. The board in front of it is not, because it encrypts on the way through whether or not a password was ever set, and the key stays on that board. The internal drives arrive bare — Blue and Black out of desktops and laptops, Red out of a NAS, Purple out of a recorder. Shingled models read slowly and have to be copied in short passes. Whatever turns up, it is cloned read-only first and the work is done on the clone. Drives come to us by post from across Hull and the East Riding.

Most jobs: nothing back, nothing to pay Free to look at, then one fixed price Parcels come in from Beverley, Grimsby and Skegness

An engineer will take the details
0800 6890668

Western Digital: putting a name to the symptom.

Nothing similar? Go to the triage →
What you seeWhat the fault isWhat to try
The My Passport spins but never appearsThe board that encrypts the disk has failed; the disk is often fineSend it in one piece
A WD Red has dropped out of the NAS boxOne disk of the set has gone, and a rebuild can make it worseLeave the rebuild until it is imaged
The recorder shows no old footageRecorders write over themselves; how far back variesTake the recorder off power now
It clicks, stops, then clicks againThe heads are not reading and the drive keeps resettingPull the power out of it
The drive now shows up as RAWThe file system header has gone; what sat under it may notRefuse every offer to repair it
A copy off it slows to a standstillShingled platters, weak sectors, or the two togetherStop the copy; clone it instead
Sending it to us: pack it well, insure it for the full value and send it tracked to the Leeds intake lab. Return postage is ours. If you want an engineer to look over the packing before you tape the box shut, ring first. The detail is in the sending page.

Which WD you have, and why it matters.

My Passport and My BookThe pocket drive and the mains-powered desktop unit. The disk in either one is ordinary. The board in front of it is not: it encrypts on the way through, password set or not, and the key stays on the board. Send the whole unit, case and all.
Elements and EasystoreThe plainer cases, sold without WD's backup software. Some pass the disk straight through and some do not, and you cannot tell from outside which you have. Either way the rule holds: send the unit as it stands, not a bare disk.
Blue, Black, Red, PurpleWD name their internal drives by colour. Blue is the everyday desktop and laptop disk. Black is the quicker one. Red goes in NAS boxes, so it nearly always arrives as one of a set and the set has to be handled together. Purple is built for recorders that write all day, which is why it turns up full of footage nobody can play.
SMR, and what it costs youSome WD drives write in overlapping bands, so altering anything means rewriting the band around it. They are slower when healthy and far slower when they are not. Imaging one runs to days rather than hours, in short passes, and no fee buys speed. Once a band has been written over, what was there is gone.

From the box arriving to the files going back.

Jobs we have logged →
01

A case number first, then a free diagnosis Free

Each item that arrives gets a case number the day it lands. An engineer looks at it and finds the real fault, and that costs you nothing. You are told in plain terms which files can come off the drive and which cannot. A price follows — one figure, written down. No work starts until you have seen it and agreed to it.

The diagnosis is freeOne price, put in writingNothing to pay yet
02

Working out which half has failed

The case and the disk are tested apart, because a portable can give up at either end. Everything after that is done to a read-only image, copied in short passes with the sectors that refuse left until last.

Nothing written to your diskImaged read-only, in passes
03

Get past the encryption

On a My Passport or a My Book the key is held on the USB board alone, so either the image is taken through that board or the key is lifted off it and applied to the copy. Where you set a password of your own, that is needed too. There is no way round one, and you will be told so.

Key read off the boardDecrypted, never guessed at
04

The file system rebuilt on the copy

With a full image in hand, the partitions and the directory are put back together on the copy rather than on your drive. Files are then opened — photographs, video, documents — because a name in a listing is not proof of anything. Anything that comes back damaged is marked as damaged.

Files opened, not just listedDamaged ones marked as such
05

You sign it off, then it comes back

You are not billed while you are still thinking. The list of what came off the drive goes to you first, and the invoice waits on your word. Files go home on media bought in for the job, with the postage back on us. We keep the job open until you have opened them on your own machine.

You approve the listing firstCopied onto new mediaReturn postage at our cost

What turns up most often

  • Do not open up a drive that has stopped working — the guides for doing that are written for people whose drive is healthy and who want the disk for something else. Take a failed one out and you are left with a disk full of noise and a board that held the key to it.
  • Say no when Windows offers to initialise it — the offer comes up because the machine cannot read the volume, which is the symptom, not the cause. One click lays a new signature and a fresh partition table over an encrypted volume, and that is a second fault to unpick before anyone gets to the first.
  • A Red out of a NAS is never one disk's problem — the box holds a set, and the order they sat in, the block size and the layout matter as much as the disks themselves. Send all of them, with a note of the bay each came from. Rebuilding onto a member that is already weak is the usual way a bad day turns into a worse one.
  • Drive Utilities and Dashboard are gauges, not repairs — they read SMART, run tests and push firmware out. None of it hands back a file, and a long test on a dying disk spends reads you were going to need.

What we can and cannot promise: the work is on storage. Failed, dropped, formatted or deleted WD media, external and internal, is what comes in. Where the USB board can be repaired or read, the key on it goes into the image and the folders come back arranged as they were. What cannot be done is get round a password you set and cannot remember, since the key is derived from it and bench time changes nothing there. Nor can anything be brought back once it has been written over, on a shingled drive or any other. Phones and tablets we do not take in. Which of those applies is what the free diagnosis is for.

One case from the casebook.

HU · HUL-2026-0846LOGGED ✓

A My Book Duo, striped from new, with one disk down

A studio on Humber Street sent in a My Book Duo that had stopped mounting. The two disks inside were striped, so neither of them held a whole file. One had head damage; the other read clean. Both were copied end to end, the failed one over three passes on a donor head stack, and the stripe was put back together from those copies. The key came off the enclosure board, which had survived. The folders went home on a new drive, laid out as the Duo had them.

Both disks copied end to end3 days after it landed

Before you box it up.

Do these first

  • Unplug it and leave it unplugged
  • Send the case, the board and the disk together
  • Send the power supply with a mains-powered unit
  • Tell us the model number, and whether a password was ever set on it

What not to do

  • Levering the disk out of the case first
  • Letting Windows initialise or format it
  • Freezing it, tapping it or opening it
  • Rebuilding a NAS onto a failing disk

Asked most weeks, answered here.

Can I not just take the disk out of the case?

Not if it has stopped working. On a My Passport or a My Book the USB board does more than carry the signal: it encrypts everything on the way to the platters, whether or not a password was ever set, and the key that undoes that sits on the board. Put a healthy disk from a dead case into a SATA dock and you get noise, or an offer to initialise it. So the board and the disk both have to reach us, with the mains adapter if it is a desktop unit. If you have already opened it up, keep the case. The board in it is the useful half.

Why is copying off my WD Elements drive so slow?

Usually because of the way the platters are written. Some WD drives lay their tracks in overlapping bands, which packs more onto a disk but means a change to one track rewrites the band around it. Healthy, that shows up as a drive that pauses under load. Failing, it shows up as a copy that runs for an hour and then stops. Pushing it harder makes it worse. What it needs is a slow clone taken in short passes, the easy areas first, and that is days of work rather than an evening.

I set a password on it years ago and cannot remember it

Sometimes we can help, and only where you can show the drive is yours. The password you chose is what unlocks the key held on the board, so there is nothing to talk the drive round with — the encryption is doing what it was sold as doing. The outcome turns on what you can still bring to mind: words and dates you built passwords out of at the time, roughly how long it ran, the substitutions you leaned on. Given that, an attack on a copy of the key material stands a real chance. With nothing to go on the answer is no, and you will be told that before you have spent anything. Where no password was ever set, none of this applies and it is an ordinary job.

One of the WD Reds in my NAS has failed. What do I send?

All of them, and a note of which bay each disk came out of. A NAS spreads every file across the set, so one member on its own holds pieces of things and whole copies of nothing. Each disk is imaged, the order and the layout are worked out from those copies, and the array goes back together on the bench. More important than any of that: do not let the box rebuild onto a replacement first. A rebuild reads every surviving disk hard, and that is when the second one goes.

What people read after this.

A stopped server → Email and databases → Multi-disk systems → Everything we take in →

A drive left switched off loses nothing more.

Leave it switched off. A failing drive has a limited number of starts in it, and each one spends a little more. The free diagnosis will say which files can be read.

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