when I plugged in the drive for the first time in quite a while, I found that on each attempt it either
doesn’t get recognized at all or only as “Raw”. This happens on both of my Windows PCs, trying another usb cable doesn’t help either. When it is seen as Raw, Windows asks me to format it. When I try to do that, the formatting process stops with an error message saying Windows was unable to format the drive.
When I run WD utilities, the SMART status is shown as ok, but both the short and long test always get stuck at 90 %. I have already contacted the customer service, but they just told me to reformat the drive, which, as described, is not possible. Fortunately, I have more backups of the data, so data loss isn’t a problem here. Still, I would like to revive the drive to use it at least for media playback.
What is there left to try for me? I was thinking about removing the actual drive from the My Book case,
to see if the problem lies with the case’s usb interface and maybe not with the drive itself, but I’ve seen reports that even then the drive would be unusable because of HW encryption.
After the WD support encouraged me to try it, I did remove the disk from the case and plugged it intio my computer like a regular internal hard drive. Unfortunately, the problems remain the same. CrystalDiskInfo gives a warning, pointing to this as a bad
(and the only bad) value:
C5 Current Pending Sector Count
Current:200
Worst: 200
Threshold :0
Raw Values:000000000001
What does it mean?
I also noticed that the drive has only Power On Counts: 106 and Power On Hours 161, which makes the failure look a bit premature, even if the drive is several years old. My other WD drves are show as good, some of them having several tens of thousands of hours.
so it is indeed the drive (and not the My Book case) failing. I will try to ask the WD
support for a solution based on goodwill.
Removing the internal hard drive from a My Book case/enclosure does not render it unusable because of HW Encryption
The HW Encryption just won’t let you retrieve the data from it … but, if you re-format the drive deleting the filesystem and partition table (wiping all the data on it) it will/should be usable … as long as there are no major issues with it.
