Very often, it is the system board on the back of the drive that is bad, and once they replace it, the recover is simple and quick. Those independent technicians can often tell you whether the drive is a good candidate for recoverying files. If you can figger out who made the drive, you can contact the manufacturer who has a list of recommended independent technicians. but I have seen a lot of outfits (focused mainly on company hard drives that start at $400.) Often he companies that do this will finish the job for us for $140. They will charge us about $55 to evaluate the drive and then contact us for an estimate for the recovery. We do this work in our repair shops, but find the specialty shops are better and faster than what we can do. But those drives that come unlabled in an external bay can be from an unknown manufacturer. There are technician shops that give their prices by brand of hard drive they are to work on. Part of the reason is that they have to do the recovery the first time they get access.

But you have to agree to a certain fee because once they start, they do not stop until done. But in our experience, they can recover most of the data on the drive once they start. some recovery technicians list by brand and model of drive what they will charge. What a bummer! I won't be choosing a cloud backup service using WD products! What exactly is a USB drive 'caddy' someone mentioned? Or, would it be best to take it intact to a place like Staples and get my files salvaged? Better than personally dismantling the drive and inserting the guts in a caddy? This failure happened today. I may return it still in the box, and opt for an offsite cloud backup for all family computers. I recently purchased a 4TB WD MyBook to connect to the router for network backup, but now I have NO/ZERO confidence in Western Digital products. I'm reluctant to use any Passport now, once burned is enough for me. I connected a different/new Passport to the computer (Windows 7 Pro OS) and I got a message that it had installed the software and the drive was ready to run.

I tried a new cable, I tried a new USB port, I tried connecting to a different computer. So I'm thinking about the options listed for recovery of the personal documents. The Passport was also my backup drive, and had the Windows image on this drive as well.

I began to copy my photos from the drive to my C drive. Only, for about a week, I heard little clicking whirring sounds coming from the Passport. Here I am with the same problem as original poster.

My book wd for mac replacing parts