Case Study

Data Recovery from a WD My Passport Drive with Spindle Motor Failure

Article by:

August 11, 2022

5 min read

WD My Passport external hard drives are widely used for their compact design, high capacity, and USB 3.0 connectivity. While they are dependable storage solutions, they are still vulnerable to mechanical damage, especially due to accidental drops. In this case, a client contacted us after their WD My Passport 5TB drive stopped working and started making unusual beeping sounds. This scenario required professional WD external Hard drive recovery to safely retrieve the inaccessible data.

Our data recovery engineers identified a spindle motor failure and internal damage to the drive. Despite these serious issues, we successfully recovered nearly all of the client’s essential files.

The Client's Issue: Drive Dropped During Packing

A customer reached out to us after accidentally dropping their WD My Passport portable drive while packing up their equipment. Immediately after the drop, the drive stopped responding and emitted faint beeping noises.

These beeping sounds typically indicate that the spindle motor is stuck. In many cases, the motor may be receiving power, and the electronics may be functioning, but the platters do not spin due to mechanical failure. This is often caused by physical shock, which can jam the read/write heads or damage the motor bearings.

Initial Assessment and Cleanroom Inspection

Once the drive arrived at our facility, our technicians performed a detailed inspection in an ISO-Certified Class 10 Cleanroom. We safely unsealed the drive and discovered the following:

The spindle motor was non-functional, likely due to physical trauma from the fall.
The read/write heads were stuck on the platters, a condition often referred to as head crash.
There were visible circular scratches on the platter surfaces.

These types of physical damages can make full recovery impossible, especially when scratches destroy sectors containing critical data. However, if the majority of the data resides in undamaged regions, recovery is still possible.

The Recovery Process: Spindle Motor and Platter Work

To address the motor failure, our engineers took the following steps:

Carefully removed the jammed read/write heads from the platters.
Cleaned the heads using an ultrasonic cleaner to eliminate any fine debris.
Assessed the motor damage, which revealed seized ball bearings preventing platter rotation.

Since the original spindle motor could not be repaired, we had to transplant the platter assembly into a compatible donor hard disk assembly with a functioning motor and bearings. This is an extremely delicate procedure that requires:

Maintaining the exact alignment and spacing of the platters.
Preventing even the slightest movement of the platter stack to avoid data misalignment.

Using specialized alignment tools, our team successfully moved the platter pack into the new drive housing and reassembled the HDA without introducing further damage.

Dealing with Magnetic Surface Scratches

When read/write heads crash onto the platters, they often leave behind ring-like scratches, along with metal debris from the magnetic surface. These scratches represent permanent data loss in affected areas.

In this case, our engineers managed to recover data from the intact sectors by:

Working around damaged tracks.
Using custom-built firmware emulation and memory controller interpretation techniques.
Extracting usable data sector by sector, with priority on folders labeled by the client as critical.

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