Bench file · Pocket-size drives · BHD-2025-9134
It Has Five Goes, Then Packs In.
The last copy never finished. A move to Dudley tugged the lead out mid-write, and the Passport went into a drawer for the winter carrying twelve years of camcorder tapes and every page of her mother’s albums, scanned one at a time. She tried again in March. It still chimes when I plug it in
, and Windows lists a device it is quite prepared to remove safely, though no drive letter ever appears. What it does instead you can count: five soft hums, then nothing more
— the same five, every go.
Sounds like yours? Give us a ring.
0800 6890668
What that means.
Five is a design decision, not a fault code. Every time power arrives, the drive tells the motor to turn, looks to see whether the platters have reached speed, and stops trying once it has used up a fixed allowance rather than burn out the coil it is pushing current through. So the count is not a diagnosis, it is a budget being spent: something in there is jammed solid and the motor never gets anywhere. Meanwhile the USB electronics in the case are a small computer of their own, working perfectly well — which is why you get the chime, why a device appears in the list, and why Windows offers to eject something it has never read a single byte from.
What did the work here.
The order of the work →| Equipment | The job it did | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Ran the five attempts on a current-limited supply, and steered the imaging that followed | Gets at the factory service commands that standard ATA cannot carry |
| DeepSpar USB Imager | Copied via the drive’s own USB board so WD’s hardware encryption stayed transparent | Standard-speed imaging, taken through the USB bridge |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Read the finished image back and inspected every folder by eye | Handles the file systems other tools give up on: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS, Btrfs |
What we did.
Try it again, this time watching the amps
A single run on a bench supply with the current capped answered it: five swells of draw as the motor leaned into whatever was holding it, nothing at all to suggest the platters were spinning up, and then the firmware giving it up as a bad job. That is precisely how a spindle behaves when it is fighting something solid. It also confirmed that her attempts at home had added no damage.
Open it up and get the heads off the platter
Opening it told the story. When the lead came out during that last copy, the heads never made it back to their parking ramp; they settled onto the recording surface and a cold winter in a drawer stuck them there. Each one was worked loose by hand, and the two contact marks were checked under the microscope before power went anywhere near the motor again.
One pass end to end, on the drive’s own board
On a My Passport the encryption lives on the USB board, not the disk, so that board stayed in the chain and the imaging hardware sat behind it — the same route WD built for the data in the first place. The copy ran from the first sector to the last with no break in it. Once a head stack has stuck to a platter, it never gets a second cold start.
How it closed.
Everything was there: the tapes she had transferred, every scanned album page, all of it, returned on fresh media with one recommendation attached. A spare kept in the same house is barely a spare. The Passport itself is finished and will not be used again.
Other pages worth a look here.
Also filed under Pocket-size drives.
Is yours behaving the same way?
Switch the device off, post it in, and decide nothing until the diagnosis comes back to tell you where you stand.