My Passport 1TB inaccessible

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

I have a 1TB My Passport SE drive which appears to receive power, spins up, and doesn’t make any unfortunate noises when powered on, but which is inaccessible in Windows.  It does receive a drive letter, and is listed as functioning properly in Device Manager - albeit with a very long lag in opening the properties page.

However, the volume never actually mounts and no capacity is ever listed in Explorer, and attempts to use or access it do not seem to cause any response from the drive, judging by status light, but do tend to freeze the program attempting access.

WD’s diagnostic tool (edit: DLG) recognizes the drive and correctly reports model, serial, capacity, and a PASS status for S.M.A.R.T. a moment before the program freezes.

I suspect either USB port damage from an accidental over-hard bump (edit: specifically a downward bump to the cable, the drive was stationary and anchored) or partial electronics failure; I would’ve just plugged it into a SATA port to test further, but much to my very displeased surprise, I discovered the old news of no SATA included a bit later than everyone else.

Does anyone have any thoughts? Just like everyone else, I would rather not lose the data on it - it just happened to die right before I was about to restore a backup of my laptop after installing a Win8CP - dammit, Murphy.

Edit: Diskmgmt can only detect (with much delay) that it is indeed a disk, of appropriate capacity, but cannot detect the filesystem or any other details about the volume, and then proceeds to freeze. Additionally, the activity light stays on steadily, with no indication of any activity whatsoever, save for when the drive initially powers on and spins up, and though it does not make unfortunate noises, it does make the noises one would expect of a normal HDD. Multiple ports and cables (default cable and usb 2 micro cable) have been tried.

2

your drive is hardware encrypted, adding sata connector by soldering it on is not going to do anything.  and if your drive hangs while trying to mount - well then it can only go that far.

3

I’d already read about the hardware encryption, and though it seems immensely foolish when used in this way, I suppose it’s too late to **bleep** now and not the time or place for it.

I didn’t say anything about soldering on a SATA port, that’d be pretty self-evidently useless - I simply discovered later than most that, disappointingly, this particular series of drive has no SATA connection.

I have no idea what the drive itself is doing, just that the volume never mounts, though the system otherwise acknowledges the drive and it powers and spins up apparently normally.

Unfortunately, “well then it can only go that far” isn’t particularly enlightening, I would appreciate a somewhat more verbose opinion and/or diagosis and any suggestions.