My Passport is Kaput (help?!)

[Guest]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for taking the time to read this at all.

So the other day my Drive bunjied off my lap but, being the chord was too long, it kasplatted on the ground.

Since then its not mounting on my Macbook Pro or appearing in 'Disk Utility'.

It does appear on a Windows Vista machine in Device Manager and also in Disk Manager (as an uninitialised drive) but not in My Computer.

Consequently any 'recovery' software I have tried can not see the drive either, other than it being a fresh drive to 'setup'.

The drive 'activity' light flashes constantly.

I am considering now to take it to professionals - but they charge $500+

I have a USB to ATA converter and was considering having a go myself and thought I'd open the case up to the super-brains at tomshardware before signing on the dotted line, as it were.

Thank you!

-Peter

 

[fzabkar]

WD's Passport drives integrate the USB-SATA bridge IC on the hard drive's PCB, so a USB-to-SATA converter would be useless.

Does your drive spin up?

A common result of a dropped drive is stiction (heads stuck to platters), or a seized spindle motor.

 

[Guest]

WD's Passport drives integrate the USB-SATA bridge IC on the hard drive's PCB, so a USB-to-SATA converter would be useless.

Does your drive spin up?

A common result of a dropped drive is stiction (heads stuck to platters), or a seized spindle motor.

It hums away pretty happily and seems to spin.

If it wasn't spinning wouldn't it still be detectable/mountable?

 

[fzabkar]

If the drive didn't spin, then all that the OS would see would be the USB-SATA bridge IC, usually an Initio INIC-1607E.

BTW, "mounting" is a term that refers to the file system, not the drive. That is, you mount an NTFS or FAT32 volume. You don't mount the physical drive.

I don't know what tools are available for the Mac, but what do either of the following utilities report about your drive?

HD Sentinel (DOS / Windows / Linux):
http://www.hdsentinel.com/

HDDScan for Windows:
http://hddscan.com/

How does Microsoft's UVCView utility see the external drive?
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/USB_IDs/UVCView.x86.exe