WD My Passport 0740 - cannot read from disk, "driver detected controller error on harddisk ..."

Good day!

I was using my WD My Passport 0740 (1TB) as a glass vase. It never fell, never got a hit.

I kept my backups on it and read most of the times, not wrote.

Today I had to read from my backups and I got a problem:

  • Both home workstation and work laptop (Win 7 32 and 64 bit) do show WD 0740 in Device Manager and My Computer, but I cannot browse it. When clicking on the drive letter the Windows Explorer gets stuck

  • Disk Management shows nothing when clicking on it - it gets stuck as well showing a grey screen.

  • The drive led is blinking all the time.

  • When the drive is connected (to USB 3.0 which it has), the Windows Event viewer shows error “driver has detected controller error on harddisk ” when I try to access the disk.

Does it mean that my WD drive is gone together with all my backups?

If not, how can it be recovered?

Please, help!

Welcome to the Community.

Have you tried changing the USB 3.0 cable for a USB 2.0 cable in order to confirm if the controller issue relates to the USB 3.0 controller itself? If so, it may still work when USB 2.0 mode is forced with a cable.