WD My Book won't Power ON (What to do if WD My BOOK or any other power drives of WD tend to fail without any warning, MY 2$ 100% data Recovery Story)

[Arun07]

I’m making this post here just so it will be helpful to someone as finding a solution for cases like this weren’t easy while i was looking for a solution first when i encountered a problem like this

Please Read the Story here and i have browsed several forums, online videos but NOTHING helped, this is the ONLY SOLUTION. If your power drive is out of warranty, don’t Expect WD to help you to recover the data or provide you some sort of help in this situation, i tried several times, hear me out and stop wasting time on attempting to contact wd, you will ONLY receive “copy and paste” template reply which they reply for all customers.

The solution is

How I rescued my data from a 3TB WD My Book External Hard Drive

Read the interaction fully

click the image or open the image link in new tab(mouse right click on image → open link in new tab)

i zoomed out the page to bring all the content/details to a single image, if you can’t read with ease, read it here

https://bit.ly/3yNKCh j

copy the link text and hit “paste and go” in the address bar of the Brave browser on your PC , it will directly redirect you to this comment (making this comment to be on top of the video)

[Arun07]

Another solution

My WD External HD enclosure failed, how do I access the HD thorugh Windows 10 ?

GitHub - themaddoctor/linux-mybook-tools: tools for opening some encrypted WD...

the above links are another solution But you need to have linux operating system and good programming knowledge. Even if you’re able to recover the data using linux, if you want to use the drive again on the windows operating system back again, you need to follow the method 1(as you need to remove the attached encryption/power board out of the drive and format it back again using the GPT disk method on disk management which gets rid of the wd hardware encryption and makes it as independent sata drive with the cost of you losing all the data on it due to format)

Again, i remind you, Don’t buy wd my book drives again, it’s better to buy wd independent sata drives and a good sata to usb connector because with wd my book drives, if power board fails at some point, your data is gone forever unless you’re lucky to find a donor drive of the same exact model, but with independent wd sata drives, even if a 3rd party sata to usb enclosure fails, you can just buy another one and your data will become accessible again.

Wd manufacturing is bad at power design of these “my book” drives (specifically power protection aspect, it should have always been about drives failing due to aging and power function still works, but as far as i’ve read all the wd my book cases online, most of the times it’s always that the drive is really in good health but power supply fails)

I’ve really lost all the confidence with these wd my book drives and i am constantly thinking about opening the existing already working fine wd my book enclosure to take the drive out of it and make it as independent sata drives by using a sata to usb connector, atleast that will give me a peace of mind that you can confidentially power up the drive, i am currently always getting/having that fear (of oh whether the drive will show up this time on explorer without miserably failing) whenever i plug the usb of these drives into PC…

Even if you look at the evolution of the wd my book drives, you can clearly see wd is not putting any effort in bringing any kinds of new technology to these drives on the power protection aspects, like if there is any surge or excessive wrong voltage gets passed through wd my book drives, the new technology will have triple protection layers, and if one gets failed, wd my book can have three tiny red lights, and as a sign of indication to the user that the drive has went through an internal power issue, protection layer 1 is compromised and 2 more protection(spare layers) are still left, 1 tiny red light can be lit up, if the 2nd layer fails, 2nd red light can be lit up (While selling the drives, wd should write a note on the description to alert users to take a backup immediately but if you look at the behavior/evolution of western digital bringing to their wd my book drives, while drive tech and it’s firmware gets improved every year, wd does absolutely nothing to the my book drives power protection )

and for some reason, wd removed light effects on the 2022 model, i think wd thinks it’s cool achievement if they make the drive’s enclosure body more slimmer, quieter drive and no external light effects but unfortunately it’s not, you need to have separate light effect to indicate that the drive is sleeping, a sleep mode led button where it tells us drive is in deep sleep and energy is being saved, the standard power light which tells us that the drive is ON, and then all these triple warning buttons which i illustrated earlier.

i think this tech is super innovative to extend HDD health

but i think wd will not do it as it will increase the overall price and wd want people to buy drives more often so they are preserving these flaws…my wish is that either wd starts innovating new products for us to buy like portable HDD coolers (like the notebook cooler products) and sata drive coolers and start selling it separately OR atleast give that extra care to 14tb and higher space hard drives.

For me, i have the money to buy 18 tb drives and i really want to have one of them (as with the portable 5tb usb drives, you have to plug out and plug in different drives more often to locate the needed data as data will be stored on different drives and having a larger size drive will fix this issue by offering the convenience of having to connect it only once and greatly reduce the number of times you have to eject it ) BUST JUST NOT BUYING IT AND HOLDING BACK due to these drives not introducing any power protection tech and it’s not at all giving the confidence on the reliability factor, it should be about drive telling the users, you can buy me with confidence and i will serve you all the times while you need me and the one and only time i will fail is if you drop me on the floor accidentally.

i hope wd changes their behavior on how they manufacture and start offering wide range of new power protection for the my book drives.

[Keerti_01]

Hi @Arun07,

Have you opened a Support Case? If not opened, for more information, please contact the WD Technical Support team for the best assistance and troubleshooting:
https://support-en.wd.com/app/ask

[Arun07]

i didn’t made this post because i have a problem now, my problem is already fixed by using the yt method as illustrated in method 1, i made this post freshly just so if someone else’s MY Book gets failed in the future due to lack of innovation in wd my book’s power design, they can easily find all of the possible recovery methods all in one place.

As far as i know, these two are the only possible solutions to recover the data from a wd my book drive(if the power supply is dead but the drive is still fine)

while i had an issue, these 2 solutions weren’t easy to find and i just put it together in one place on a same thread so others can gain information from this. Wd should not get into Hardware based encryption if they are not good at power protection designs

i am using multiple surge protectors so i am clueless as to why my wd my book failed with power supply

idk why wd is obsessed with making sata drives enclosure slimmer, please stop with that thinking and bring some innovation in power protection where drive indicates a red light signal on the enclosure before miserably it gets failed.

[Chris.M]

Greetings,

We have reached out to you via direct message, so we request you kindly check and reply to your DMs so that we can assist you further.

[Arun07]

I think you’re misunderstanding the purpose of this thread (currently it’s not about i am having an issue right now at the moment as the issue which i had was already fixed using a donor drive of the same model, the purpose of the topic is to help others who will come across this same issue in the future or already facing the same issue and demanding WD to bring innovation in the power protection layers of external hard drives which requires dedicated power supply) .

If you’ve read this entire thread, you would’ve noticed the points which i talked about bringing three RED LED light warnings in the front of the HDD and all the newer 2023 External WD MY Book drives will come up with Triple protection layers to guard against Electrical surge, accidental loss of power or high voltage etc…Currently for me there is no issue about losing power as i already have Exide pure Sine wave UPS, also using Huntkey Surge Protector Plus Lapcare Spike Buster (that’s dual level of serious protection but still the 9 year old WD my book drive’s enclosure power supply failed(even though the drive is absolutely good and shows healthy in crystaldiskinfo as i am using that failed enclosure’s drive using QZ Sata to USB Connector))

The Point of wd my book drives should have always been the wd drives getting failed due to accidental drops or misuse or extreme aging due to super heavy workloads given to the External drive BUT THE ULTIMATE REALITY which im seeing from my issue as well as all other issues which i’ve read on the web is that the drive is always really healthy due to marvellous engineering but the enclosure and that usb power connector board getting failed due to lack of innovation to work on power protection aspects.

WD Should reimagine how these external drives should work in order to guard against power issues like offering triple protection layers as illustrated earlier which will give buyers confidence on reliability or it’s much better to have an intermediate battery similar to how laptop batteries tends to work So that Everytime the drive needs power to spin, it will utilize the batteries to power up and auto stop the WD external drive’s power Supply while the batteries are reaching 10%.

Please don’t be stingy with battery/adapters design, 1 Single FULL CHARGE should give 120 hours of usage(Drive’s UP time) and to enhance the drive protection, design the firmware in a way where the drives can’t be used while the batteries are being charged and drive’s “Write features” will temporarily be suspended after the battery charge hits a certain limit of battery level.

Don’t Engineer it in this way
A. Adapter → B. Battery → C. Drive
Rather it should be
A. Surge Protection Adapter → B. WD’s own Surge protection boards/high voltage guard (Layer 1) → C. WD’s own SECONDARY Surge protection boards/high voltage guard (Layer 2) → D. Battery’s adapter → E. Drive’s Battery → F. Actual drive

Both the Battery and the actual drive should come up with Built-in display to indicate how many % of power is charged on the battery and how many % of the charge is left on the drive and enhanced information of drive’s health status. Separate lights for Bad sectors and lights for Sleep mode indications. idk why wd removed lights on the latest wd my book but it’s not cool

The Reason why i even pushing this thread is due to WD Thailand team is fooling customers with all of the portable drives now being ONLY 4800 RPM even though the product details page says they are 5400 RPM. I’m not feeling good while i see this results.

these drive’s are working fine and im Quite satisfied with the way how these drive’s work but deep inside i still have this guilt of WD Thailand team is fooling Customers like me plus others and getting away with cheaping out the parts and tech which usually used to be super high before 2020… if they say, it’s 5400 RPM then it should be 5400 RPM, not 4800 RPM

The 1st 4 images with the highlights of Red are the ones which i got this year and the last two CDI reports which are green (one is 14 TB drive which i got earlier this year before my 1st ever wd power drive’s enclosure got failed and the 2nd one is 750 GB HDD which has windows 8.1 is the one im using now currently, that drive’s reliability as you see on the image is the main reason why all of my 72 TB drive collection are full of WD)

From these images, you can see that 14 TB drives are 5400 RPM also my current 750 GB HDD is of 7200 RPM. Since WD Elements, My passport, and My Passport ultra have not introduced a new design change for the external casing, no new colors, no rgb lighting and this 4800 RPM issue is going on, i’ve decided to take a long break from buying portable drives of wd until wd introduces changes in portable drive’s external casing.

For now, Since i needed space, i ordered wd my book again but just not going to trust WD’s power engineering and with added hardware encryption board, it’s a head ache if enclosure gets failed again at some point, i am going to shuck the new 4tb drive out of the enclosure just to get rid of the hardware encryption board and use a SATA to USB connector to take full advantage of drive. I Seriously dont want to get an SSD just because of 1 disadvantage which it contains, although it has many here’s the one which annoys me a lot… Data will disappear if they are not being used regularly, No thanks, i dont want to live for the moment, i want long term reliability which HDDs are capable of offering. I will not buy an SSD.

And also i am buying WD 4TB My Passport Ultra Metal drive to check whether 4tb drives are also 4800 RPM OR these issues are present only for 5 TB drives. The reason for wd My Book drive being only 4 TB is because this is the 1st time im going to perform shucking on a very brand new HDD, the ones which i shucked are 9 year old WD drives… if the New drive’s shucking gets failed which i’m hoping it won’t, i will be alright as its only 4tb But if the shucking goes good and everything works just fine, i will also be shucking my 14 TB drive sooner after getting another SATA to USB Connector.

If WD were extra caring enough to work on innovating wd power drive’s power protection, there is no reason for me to do all this but the problem is wd doesn’t seem to care to protect the drives as working on these wide range of tech such as power protection and cooling fan will jack up the price a whole lot but wd should also realize that they still hold the power to keep doing what they’re doing for the standard MY Book drives and offer this wide range of new innovative tech such as surge protection, battery designs and cooling fans for a new variant which can be referred as My Book Plus or MY Book Ultra.

Although the likeliness of wd listening to this request is very low as i’m just one single user, but there’s still hope.

Sidenote : Just to make sure i’m not spreading false information, i will add a screenshot to claim all of this information is absolutely true and reports weren’t generated at different times

I’ll post and update about the new drive’s RPMs and shucking of drives resulted in success or not as soon as the drives and tools arrives.

Thanks.

[Arun07]

Alright, i’ve cancelled the previous Torx driver order and ordered a new Torx driver from amazonbasics just so i could get it faster

And as i wished and prayed, the shucking operation resulted in success. Instead of a credit card as shown in the video, i used a Gold card as i felt it was more thin, strong and sharp and as per my instinct, it really helped to get the drive out of the enclosure faster.

Also the Torx driver is T10, it was little bit tight but with enough pressure, it helped to get the job done. I removed the drive out of the enclosure completely and Got rid of the hardware encryption which comes along with it. It feels good to see ASMedia ASM1153E chipset is controlling the drive now. I don’t really hate the My Book’s enclosure as it’s good looking in design but what i hate is the forceful nature of wd adding hardware encryption on their drives. It’s like if the drive’s power supply fail at some point, data will be completely inaccessible due to this board inside it and wd refuses to sell spare parts of older models by themselves. i think wd should not do hardware encryption if they are not innovating power protection tech and are not generous to sell spare parts for a much longer time(i dont even use password for my windows PC), it’s better to see new range of products like My Book Ultra or My Cool Book or My Cool Dude or something like that with above said ideas…

As per the RPM of these drives, the power drives came with promised 5400 RPM, However, the wd my passport ultra was only 4800 RPM

Even though the wd my passport ultra result seem to be disappointing, im little bit happier as i got a different color from collections which i already have, i usually used to have Black, white, Dark Blue and this time i got silver and it’s looking good. Not interested in Red or light blue with light black/grey combos. i’ve got all the colors which i liked and now out of choices to buy the next portable drive until wd releases next version of new designs. For wd Black 5tb drives, i didnt really love the way how “BIG TEXTS” are written on the drives with P10 as name.

Going to take a long break from buying portable drives and start practising the habit of shucking power drives as a norm to get the independent sata drive for less price. ASMedia tech and QZ is really giving me a huge boost of confidence to buy the 3.5 inch drives of WD without any worries, At least they are 5400 RPM, So happy with that.

[dumpy2]

Hello and firstly thank you very much Arun07,
The YouTube video made perfect sense.
Silly me I never thought through some areas before purchasing WD my book.
WD has its very own software, so dropping HD into another bay. And plug into computer would be a fail.
I liked the comments HD should fail before the power supply or control board. I believe you wrote.

I have not used the My book in years and had presumed the power supply had failed.
Or the HD. At least I have the direction to go forth and maybe see some old photos. You cannot beat photo albums:)