Safest way to fully wipe and restore a corrupted MPWP - UI, SD card or re-formatting via USB?

WD External Drives My Passport Wireless
1

Hello,

I still have problems with my MPWP, which I tried to update manually. I was updating from a rather old firmware version to v1.03.04 using a local “MyPassportWirelessGen2_1.03.04.bin” file on my laptop, the laptop being located close to the drive in the same room. Updating via WiFi by the use of the old dashboard did not finish after 60 minutes. So I switched the drive off and on again and triggered a system restore by holding both buttons on the back of the drive for 10 seconds. After the drive had restarted, in order to force an update to v1.03.04 from SD card now, I switched the drive off again, inserted an exFAT formatted SD card with the firmware file sitting in an “\update” folder and switched it on again (please advise if this is not the correct procedure to update the firmware from SD card, it is not documented in the user manual unfortunately).

I learned (thanks a lot, Timothy) that I might have initially corrupted the system by switching the drive off during the hanging firmware update. Is it possible that the flash memory of the MPWP might have also got corrupted by switching off during the hanging firmware update? Can a corrupted flash memory be completely repaired by doing a manual firmware update from dashboard via WiFi, i.e. when the actual corrupted system itself is used for updating via WiFi? Shouldn’t flashing the firmware from SD card always be the safer solution?

What I also would like to ask in this context: Is re-formatting an MPWP to exFAT via USB doing any harm to the system? Maybe it only wipes the harddisk, but the system will reboot fine next time I switch the drive on? So the safest way to fully wipe and restore a corrupted MPWP (after making a copy of the stored user data, of course) might be re-formatting to exFAT via USB and installing the firmware from SD card, is that true?

Thank you.

Kind regards,
Alex

2

Hi there,

Yes, the process you described is the best way to wipe the drive. You should be able to format the drive in exFAT and use the drive normally, this is the file system the drive has by default.

3

Hi,

Great, thank you.

Yesterday, I have started a “Full Test” from dashboard for the empty 3 TB drive. Progress was 35 % about 4 hours later, after which I had to close my browser and do some different work. I left the drive untouched, plugged into AC power, the test was obviously running, some very soft noise coming from the disk. The surface temperature of the drive was about 110 degrees at that time. Today the test seems to have finished, the drive is quiet again, both LEDs blinking very slowly (I guess this indicates some kind of sleep mode).

Is there any logfile in the drive I can open from a USB-connected PC today, to see the result of this full test?