I/O Device Error + filesystem RAW on external WD My Passport

[TommykCZ]

Hi everyone,

I have a problem with my 1TB external hard drive.

Info about the drive:
- Western Digital MyPassport WDBBEP0010BBK-03
- Bought on September 2013
- I treated him very well because I used it just for backup (on operation it was in a horizontal position without moving it, when not operating it was lying on a shelf)

Info about the problem:
- The last occasion I worked with the drive was 12 days ago (on May 20th) without any problem with accessing files
- Today I cannot open the drive at all after connecting it to my Windows 10 PC (the same USB port as always with "power+" sign next to it)
- The error message reads:
"Location is not available (title of the window)
D:/ is not accessible.
The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error."
Image in Czech:

- The Disk Management says the file system is RAW, the status is healthy and there is 100 % free space (there should be around 700-800 GB of data, less or more important)
- The Device Manager sees it properly among disk drives as "WD My Passport 07A8 USB Device"
Image in Czech:

Additional info:
- The motor works - the hard drive vibrates in the same way as always
- The communication works - at least between the PC and firmware storage because I managed to successfully upgrade the firmware from 1.0.42 to 1.0.49
- I didn't try to do any write operations (format or something like that)

If you have additional questions, please ask me.

If anyone of you could provide me with helpful information, I would be very very thankful since I have some important data on the disk. Maybe you are thinking to yourself "why didn't he backup"? I did. But on this drive while I RMAed the drive in my laptop (otherwise I had the data always twice). Bad luck.

Thank you in advance for any helpful info

Tom

UPDATE: I forgot to say that the Disk Management took 10-15 minutes to show some info.

 

[DR_Luke]

It is likely that this drive has physical issues and really should be assessed by a professional data recovery lab. With the WD Passport drives, it usually a relatively inexpensive recovery with the equipment that most professional data recovery labs have.

Here is a link to a post about Partition Showing as RAW that might help give you a better idea of what is happening.

Before you do anything, power the drive off and take some time to determine the value of the data on the drive. Every time it is powered on, it is likely causing more damage, depending on the root cause of the error.