I have a 250MB Western Digital My Passport drive. Its worked OK for about 6 months but now when I connect it to any number of macs it does nothing. There are six little LEDs that used to blink back and forth when it connected and now they all glow without moving. It won't mount and is not visible in Disk Utility or Disk Warrior.

I've swapped cables and even tried dual USB cables. I can feel it vibrating when its connected so somethings happening.

Is there a way to open these up and put in another case to test or other such ideas?

Western Digital has a five year warranty on that drive. If you open it up you risk voiding that warranty. Contact your dealer or Western Digital and get it replaced. The vibration is simply an indication the drive is receiving power and is spinning up.

OK - its the second one that's died on me and I'm more interested in trying to get the data off it. Anyone else have similar issues with this drive? From what I've seen on the web they are notorious for suddenly deciding not to mount as this one and the previous did.

You might download the demo of Data Rescue and see if it can detect your drive. Years ago I had great success with an earlier version of the product recovering most of my data from a failing LaCie drive.

There's a fair chance the drive itself is fine and the controller inside is shot. In which case the drive can be removed to get the data off. Maybe 90% of hard drive failures can be determined by listening to them, what sort of sounds do you hear?

People in your position have to determine what's more important to them - the cost of replacing the drive, or the data on it. If you open it you may be able to get your info off. If you don't, you can get the drive replaced without cost. I think they enjoy stuffing you with that choice, because it gets them out of some of their warranty replacements. "there oughta be a law..."

Of course all the big drive sellers now (seagate, wd, hitachi, etc) offer data recovery services, "at a nominal price", where you get your data and don't have to pay for a replacement. All I can think of when I read that is, how convenient!

Do any of the sounds at Datacent sound familiar?

Thanks for the replies. Data Rescue sees nothing, and I can't see the drive in terminal using df.

Those datacent sounds are scary! Makes you want to backup everything immediately.

I suspect its the case enclosure that's at fault as WD Passport drives have power issues. I used a dual USB cable and the click-whir sound stopped, which is a hopeful (lack of) sound.

I'm going to investigate putting the disk in another enclosure, as the value of info is more than the value of the drive.

All WD wants to do is a straight old for new swap out of stock. No offer of swapping enclosures.

The df (display filesystems) command shows only mounted volumes.

Try this in Terminal

diskutil list

Examples are in Using diskutil

I've already gone through those sounds and also the ones you can get on the ipod app and from drivesavers, and was quite surprised to NOT find many sounds I recognized. And I deal with 20-40 bad hard drives / month so I was expecting a lot of familiar sounds.

Tempts me to make my own collection. At one time I did start such a collection. Actually, I have a BOX here with over 100 bad hard drives in it, it wouldn't be too hard to do.

oh lord another project. just what I needed.

There's a saying about this sort of thing. If you want something done right, assign it to the busiest person that you know.

ain't that the truth?

Call of the Wild Dying Hard Driveâ„¢

I'd like to point out that 100% of the drives in the dead box are inaccessible without extreme measures. (do not post to the bus) So if you hear that, either take out a loan for drivesavers, or give NewEgg a call.

ALSO, none of those drives were hooked to a computer. So on a few when you hear them calibrate, spin up, and adjust, and then appear to access, that access sound isn't supposed to happen. So when hooked to a computer you'd expect to hear access after that, but not when powered on but not attached to the computer.

what I truly found interesting was that close to 1/2 of the hard drives that were doing something nasty (like tapping on boot) weren't doing it when I tried to record them today. Maybe "let it sit a day/month/year" is a valid quick fix?

The tak-tak-tak-tak were not all recorded. There were just too many to bother with. Seagates out of macbooks. Very popular way to go. Does not include drives returned for warranty.

Well I dismantled the case. Its a silver 250GB one an it has hidden tabs at each side of the top that hook in and break when you try to open it, so there goes the warranty.

As I figured, the drive works perfectly once removed from the case.

Before it went kerfut I ran it for a short time as a boot drive for a MacBook migration and it got very hot so I don't recommend using the WD Passport drive for this for extended periods.

++++++++++

Out of interest, here is what's on the WD site - what will void the warranty:

* The label on the drive has been tampered. For more details, please see our warranty limitations.

* The drive has been tampered.

* For FireWire, USB, and Combo drive - the drive is removed from its external case. (This does not apply to the WD My Book Pro II and Premium II external hard drives)

* The drive was repaired by a company not authorized by Western Digital. If you use a company that is not one of the authorized preferred data recovery partners to recover data or repair your drive, your warranty will be voided.

* Replacing the system's circuit board.

If the drive does not show up in Disk Management (Windows), or Disk Utilities (Mac), and you have tried all the troubleshooting options relevant to your drive, then your drive has most likely failed and you will need to contact a data recovery company to retrieve your data.

Well I proved that last paragraph wrong!

Someone brought in a LaCie bigdisk 1TB for me to work on. Provided two power packs.

BOTH packs were dead. Well, not totally dead, but neither was supplying the full +12 so the drives just chattered when powered on.

I was able to get it to spin them up by using an adapter I happened to have here. But when plugged in, the mac wanted to format it. After talking with the customer, I disassembled the enclosure and SWITCHED the two 500gb drives. Then the volume LaCie mounted fine.

Turns out they'd already taken it to someone else that told them the enclosure was shot (since BOTH packs couldn't POSSIBLY both be bad!) and had inadvertently switched the hard drives when removing them for testing. (since switching drives in a primitive raid stripe like that is all kinds of bad) hah... guess we know who THAT customer will be bringing their stuff to from now on?

And of course the fan in the "bigdisk" (well that's not quite how we refer to them around here) wasn't spinning. Those fans have about a 2 month MTBF as far as I can tell. Usually cooks the drives. Considering the fan and how common power pack failures are (obviously), I told them to get a replacement enclosure and we'd copy the data to the new one.

an it has hidden tabs at each side of the top that hook in and break when you try to open it, so there goes the warranty.

those CAN be opened without breaking the tabs if you know the tabs are there. The outer shell slides off the frame by pulling it toward the front.

Nice

I've had soooo many problems with LaCie enclosures I'd never go near one again. My favorite LaCie story is when I started this job a few years ago and found they were doing nightly disk-to-disk Mac server backups on these no-frills externals while a whole pile of LaCie externals were just sitting there. Why? They said a couple drives were still good, but the power pack from every single enclosure had died. About a dozen. I couldn't believe it so tested each one and sure enough they were all bad. Amazing.

Still, they were just backup disks, so not as bad as all the LaCie RAID0 controller failures I've seen in production. Why anyone with anything but the highest i/o needs (see: video editing) would ever risk a consumer-grade RAID0 is beyond me, but I've never seen anything like the failure rates with LaCie.

Pulling the cover forward is good in theory and that's what I tried to do, but I practically stripped my fingernails trying to get it to budge. After I got it off I couldn't see what was holding it in so tightly.

Interesting how this post has strayed, but I was thinking of getting a LaCie d2 quadra 1T to back up to in future, as I thought it may be more reliable than the plastic case drives on the consumer market. Are there issues with this model?

I have not had any recent experience with LaCie drives but I have had good results with several OWC Mercury Elite Pro Drives and bare enclosures that I put my own drives in. They are rugged, reliable, fast, and assemble/disassemble easily.

OWC of course doesn't make their own hard drives, but they seem to be sticking with quality brands and models.

I like the options for their enclosures though I would like one very particular variety that they don't offer.

1xfw400 (full size)
1xfw800
1xusb-b (FULL SIZE!)

But no one seems to make a 2.5" enclosure with that particular combination. The idea is I can carry a short 400-800 fw cable and a standard USB A/B cable and that's it. As it is now I also have to carry a USB A/miniB. Enclosures with only 800/800 or 400/400 require me to carry two cables, or a cable and an adapter to cover all possible needs.

Right now I am actually going with a LaCie rugged. No fan in the little thing and no power adapter to worry about so I may be safe....

I've also have good luck with OWC enclosures, but just as good luck with cheaper ones as well. Most-recently I've bought a few 500 GB WD My Passport for Mac drives -- the Mac version only because they were on blowout for significantly less than the standard version and are identical except for silver trim. Came to be even less $ than if I had bought a commodity enclosure and an internal. These My Passport drives are reported to have better overall failure rates than some others (like my recent Seagates), but of course all drives have higher rates than they used to and the % don't matter when yours fails. I've seen the My Passport Essential drives for VERY cheap, but they only have a 1-yr warranty instead of the standard 3-yr, so I stuck with the regular My Passport for a little more.