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Question

External hard drive issues

Jan 13, 2015 3:58PM PST

Hey all,
I'm somewhat new to the forum thing, so I apologize ahead of time if I'm not up on the proper forum etiquette. I like to fix my own computer issues, but this one is driving me nuts for a few years. I have a Wd my passport essential external hard drive that is not accessible anymore. Worked great for about a year on media box/computer. I fell asleep one night and woke up to a frozen screen, the drive hanging from the "generous" 1' cord, and the cat with the "USB 2.0/3.0" tag from the cord being pawed at! Lol. I really don't think the shock did much but it was in use at the time (still plugged in). When plugged in it goes to driver install. USB storage checks off as ready to use, but the virtual Cd and ses fails to install and takes a good 10 minutes. It is recognized but because of the smartware/virtual Cd not showing up I can't access the drive at the password screen.

What I've tried... Auto look for driver updates, changing cables, use on different devices and data recovery software (seems to take forever but might work?).
I understand somewhat how these devices work now. I have another one I bought at the same time and it still works fine, drivers and all. I'm about to try switching the boards as a last resort.
Win 7 os.
Any advice, aside from hindsight "you should have backed up you data" and paying $1000 for a data retrieval service, would be great! Thanks all!

Discussion is locked

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Answer
take drive out of external case
Jan 13, 2015 6:06PM PST

try taking the drive out of the external case and get a usb to sata cable so you can plut the drive directly into a usb port. If that does not work, then most likely you are out of luck.

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1 little problem...
Jan 14, 2015 6:53AM PST

Thanks renegade, I've done this with another external drive before when I fried the board by plugging the USB b (square part) in wrong. I was only able to retrieve the data through a raid recovery program thou. Took 10 hours, but worked good. The problem with WD 2.5" external drives is there is no sata plug. Lol. It can be done, but you have to hard wire a cable right on the board. I'm not quite at that point yet.

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Let's hear which exact model this is.
Jan 14, 2015 7:57AM PST

I've seen some before that have an adapter that I need to unplug to expose the SATA plug.

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WD not a very nice set up
Jan 14, 2015 8:53AM PST

I'm away from it right now, but it's a passport essentials 1tb. I do have it apart (I'd post a pic if I knew how lol) the drive has 2 rows of 6 pins on the right side (bridge I'm guessing), a grafted USB port in the middle (stupid), and two pins on the right (not sure what they are)?

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Ahh, that one.
Jan 14, 2015 9:08AM PST
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Yep that's it
Jan 14, 2015 9:21AM PST

Wish u could take them apart before u buy them! Mine is the USB 3.0 grafted plug thou. The light comes on and the computer knows the drive is there. I'm guessing the physical USB port is OK.

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So you know the bridge board and clamp method.
Jan 14, 2015 9:34AM PST

Not much I can add here.

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Answer
reinstall the program
Jan 13, 2015 10:20PM PST

that's on it to your computer so you can properly interface with it. Unfortunately if it has the virtual CD system on it, you can't just put into another external drive case and access it other than to use a disk utility to completely clear it.

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This is my next step
Jan 14, 2015 7:26AM PST

Thx, I plan to try WD data lifeguard diagnostic tool I just found. I'm pretty sure you can get around the virtual Cd by using a raid/partition recovery program after the swap as long as the drive gets power?

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Your answer...
Jan 14, 2015 7:30AM PST

I think most of your answer got cut off I only see part of it.

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it would be this
Jan 14, 2015 8:39AM PST

what you have on the drive was password protected? You might be able to get past that using a LIVE DVD from a Linux distro which can allow you to access each partition directly, but even in Linux as I recall, having that virtual CD at the front interferes even in Linux until just that partition of the drive is removed/wiped with some utility like "dd" command. You could boot to the LIVE DVD and run GParted, or on a KDE type desktop environment use KParted. If that fails to ignore the VCD at the front of the drive, then unless you are familiar with other Linux, I'd seek professional help. I have such a VCD on WD around here, I'll give it a look using Mint 17 and see what's available and post back.

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Thanks
Jan 14, 2015 9:44AM PST

I think when I got it I put a password on it during setup and got irritated typing it in all the time. I'm pretty sure I took it off. Even so, I think you still had to click the vcd to mount the drive? I've tried a partition recovery program that should have worked the same way. I ran it on the drive for 8 hours with no progress. It does show the size of the drive and that it's unallocated space? I'm leaning toward a problem with the USB interface through the board to the drive?

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yes, you still have to clk on the unlock
Jan 15, 2015 12:41PM PST

I believe. You just wouldn't enter a password. Partition software isn't looking for a UDF section at the front fo the drive, it sees that and expects some CD/DVD program to deal with it. UDF isn't even a standard Torito and/or ISO 9660 method of using CD's, it's something Roxio (I think they were first) came up with years ago for rewritable disc and then later was incorporated into windows for same reason.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_9660

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Torito_%28CD-ROM_standard%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format

note the info in the UDF concerning XP and SP3.

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IMPORTANT !
Jan 15, 2015 1:21PM PST

I ran my part number to discover mine is My Book Elite. I remembered also that the VCD program that acts as the password entry is NOT on the drive, but on an embedded chip. I also discovered this which will help you, and me if I ever need it.

http://support.wdc.com/product/install.asp?groupid=122&lang=en

This however is where I found what is needed. This applies to the World Book, but may work the same for My Book versions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital_My_Book#Internals

This drive runs BusyBox on Linux on an Oxford Semiconductor 0XE800 ARM chip which has the ARM926EJ-S core. In addition it uses a VIA Cicada Simpliphy vt6122 Gigabit Ethernet chipset, and a Hynix 32 Mbit DDR Synchronous DRAM chip. The webserver is the mini_http server, although older "bluerings" use Lighttpd. The drives of the World Edition are xfs or ext3 formatted, which means that the drive can be mounted as a standard drive from within Linux if removed from the casing and installed in a normal PC. With both sets of commands a utility such as Gparted can be used to determine which paths are relevant for a given setup.

Now, I know my Elite Edition uses NTFS, so I suspect it also can be pulled, hooked to an internal port in desktop and read from both Linux and Windows in same fashion as the World Edition above.

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my postback
Jan 14, 2015 10:35AM PST

Running the unlock.exe file in WINE under Linux results in;


Unlocking your Drive using the Unlock Application

If you used the WD SmartWare™ software Security option and set a password to lock your drive, you must unlock your drive using the Unlock application on the Virtual CD (VCD) of the WD hard drive you want to unlock.

To unlock your drive using the Unlock application:

Locate and open to the WD SmartWare Virtual CD (VCD) on the drive you want to unlock in one of the following ways:

For Windows, right-click the WD SmartWare VCD icon and choose Open from the drop-down menu.
For Macintosh, double-click the WD SmartWare VCD icon to open it.

Double-click the Unlock application to start the program, type your password to unlock the drive, and then click Unlock to unlock your drive."


==========================================

Checking the drive in GParted (a partitioning program), it doesn't detect cdrom partitions. This is the result;

"Libparted bug found, input/output error during read on /dev/sd**.....
unallocated 930 GB , unrecognised disk label"

============================================
Running Recovery mode from Gparted.

"Search for file systems on /dev/sd**

A full disk scan is needed to find file systems.
The scan might take a very long time.
After the scan you can mount any discovered file systems and copy the data to other media.
Do you want to continue?
no file systems found on /dev/sd**
The disk scan by gpart did not find any recognizable file systems on this disk."

================================

WD Smartware.exe file is an executable zip file containing folders and files, which can be observed in Linux using Engrampa archiving software.

=================================

I didn't put all the files from the VCD into the WINE program, like the *.dll files into system32 and so on, that might make it install and run OK under WINE, allowing the unlock, but one thing is sure, the GParted program can only overwrite the entire drive seeing it as unallocated.

==============================

It uses the UDF file system and is about 435 MB in size
=================================

There is a UDF program called UDFtools which may remove the VCD at the beginning of the drive. Heres the information log on it from my Linux package manager.

tools for UDF filesystems and DVD/CD-R(W) drives

This package contains a number of user-space tools related to
creating filesystems in the UDF (Universal Disk Format), which is
primarily used for DVDs, but sometimes also CD-ROMs:

mkudffs - Format a device, creating an empty UDF filesystem
cdrwtool - Low-level drive management (e.g. set writing speed, format)
pktsetup - Set up a packet writing device (/dev/pktcdvd0) for a drive
wrudf - Maintains a UDF filesystem (undocumented)

===============================================

This other linux application is available if the VDC portion at the front of the drive is messed up.

rescue files from damaged CDs and DVDs (ncurses-interface)

Dares scans a CD/DVD image or a CD/DVD for files. This also works when
the filesystem (ISO-9660 or UDF) on the disc is damaged and cannot be mounted
anymore.

=============================================

Your best bet is if WD has what you need in their windows based software that will allow access to the data on the drive. I know they have a program that turns off the VCD, but I can't remember if that has to be done BEFORE data is placed on the drive, or can do it AFTERWARDS without losing the data. If you don't want the password protection, after data recovery, you can turn that part off and then use the drive like any other external drive. After all, if you want to encrypt the data and password protect it, you can use something like truecrypt on one large partition or several different ones with each one having a different password access.

========================================================
Since my WD "smartware" drive has data saved on it, I didn't want to risk losing that data by trying more than above. I got it as a gift or I'd not have gotten this type. In future I plan to save the data elsewhere so I can set it up for direct access and not using the "windows & mac only" VCD interfering program at the front of the drive.

===================================================

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Might have to brush up on the Linux!
Jan 14, 2015 11:18AM PST

Awesome. Thanks James, this is a lot of info and options. Certainly worth a try before I get ready to perform surgery on this thing. Much appreciated!

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Answer
It's broke, period
Jan 13, 2015 11:55PM PST

I'm glad you mentioned the cat in the scenario. pets do cause damage and will continue to do so.

Your problem hasn't totally failed yet, but some feature or aspects have. The full options aren't available or the full-blown setup isn't present anymore. You can try all you want, but it appears "real damage" is present just hasn't taken it down fully. If s/w has to rely on some i/c chip buried in your WD setup to acknowledge using the s/w, then you see my point. It would at least allow certain s/w and/or supported features to have full access. A bump or knock can cause issues and since it was "ON" all the more so. Even, if you swapped the HD into another USB type enclosure you may not get the full features as I explained above. Also, the other posters have hit on all the fixes sorta speak. The only real fix is to get another similar WD setup, clone data over and continue on. This alone will be the cheapest(using WD) fix as if I understand right the problem WD setup still is working, just not all the features. DON"T swap your other setup for this one, it still works "as is" you're just going to probably hose both. I offer an entire different similar WD setup so can go that route to save that data. You can do what you want if you deem that data critical to save, I just didn't want to drag another of your working WD setups and open yet more problems other than what I explained above if you want to stay the WD route.

tada -----Willy Happy

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Damn cats!
Jan 14, 2015 8:33AM PST

Thanks Willy, I'm sure you are right that real damage could be the problem. I'm attempting the least damaging routes first to fix it. However I do believe that it's the PCB board or firmware that's failed/damaged. The drive is showing symptoms of a PCB failure: not making any clicking sound or spinning... These boards, I guess, are known break. My other passport should be the best donor board, being made within a month of the other (made the same day actually). I'm not worried about losing the other and I'm thinking it should be compatible. If not I'll have to swap the BIOS chips, cause I'm really not sure if the encryption on them would be the same (even being built on the same day)?