Hello,
I purchased this portable drive in April of 2018, so it is about 5.5 years old. I have had issues with it since 2020 though and put it away to fix later.
Currently, several different computers recognize when it is plugged in and even as a my passport drive; it does not show up in My PC though and therefore cannot be used. The drive boots up, the light comes on, and I can hear it spinning.
I have done several troubleshooting attempts, but still have not got it to work. I feel like it is salvageable because the computer recognizes as a disk drive.
As you can see…the drive is showing up as not initialized and unallocated in disk manager. When I try to initialize it as GPT I get an error: Data error (cyclic redundancy check).
Does anyone have any idea if there are other steps I can take? I’d like to get the data off of it, but will wipe it if I need to.
Lastly, I do vaguely remember getting it to work one time a few years ago by not plugging the usb cable all the way into the computer. I read somewhere that might work and it does not work doing that either.
The following S.M.A.R.T. attributes indicate that the hard drive is failing. Has it ever been dropped?
Read Error Rate = 0xFFFF (hex) = 65535 (dec)
Current Pending Sector Count = 0x0C (hex) = 12 (dec)
Read Error Rate:
Indicates the rate of hardware read errors that occurred when reading data from a disk surface. Any number indicates a problem with either disk surface or read/write heads.
Current Pending Sector Count:
Number of “unstable” sectors (waiting to be remapped). If the unstable sector is subsequently written or read successfully, this value is decreased and the sector is not remapped. Read errors on the sector will not remap the sector, it will only be remapped on a failed write attempt. This can be problematic to test because cached writes will not remap the sector, only direct I/O writes to the disk.
Thanks again for the reply. It has never been dropped; hardly been used really. So it sounds like this drive is probably junk and would be more expensive to try and repair rather than just buying a new one? This is actually my second one of these, my first one I bought lasted for several years, but now when plugged in I can hear it start to try and spin and then click. It does that repeatedly and I’ve read that it will need some work as well.
The data isn’t so important that I’d want to pay a ton of money for data recovery, do you think reformatting/erasing the drive would help at all?
Also, is there a reader I can buy to try and read the disks if I take the passport apart?
Thanks again for the info.
I have a very similar problem. My WD 4 TB MY Passport was purchased in Nov 18 and has been used very lightly as a back up drive, never been dropped, stored in proper case, and CrystalDiskInfo shows power on count of 200 with 177 hours of power on, a lot since my problems at end of 23 while trying to recover data, then giving up and trying to format as normal drive. Health Status is Caution, C5 current pending sector count 178 showing amber, as new member don’t think I can attach screenshots yet.
In Disk Management it still shows the WD Unlocker virtual CD Rom drive as healthy and this still runs and the drivce unlocks when plugged into my laptop.
I have tired both the new WD security app and hard drive app - but get cyclic redundancy error when it tries to write new password, and this is what happens after DiskPart Clean and Create Primary Partition, when trying to initialise the disk as MBR or GPT.
Very frustrating. Had WD protected the drive with the virtual CR Rom section which cannot be deleted?
When I use cmd prompt to check SMART Status it comes back with “WD My Passport 25E2 USB Device OK”
in cmd prompt it can see H Drive which is the WD Virtual CD Rom, but does not recognise the file system and cannot run chkdsk on the unallocated system as it has no drive letter.
In Acronis disk management it shows as disk 3, healthy, 3.639 TB. When I try and initialise puts a 2 TB unallocated section and tries to initialise but fails with cyclic redundancy error
Thank you for the reply. It’s very disappointing for a drive that has had so little use, 177 hours a lot of which have happened after the issue I had, same goes for 197 power up count. Also drive has been carefully cared for. I am pretty sure this is my first hard drive failure. I will not be buying any more WD drives. Have put a 2 TB Samsung SSD as 2nd drive in laptop now for my primary backup.
