A WD My Passport stopped being detected after a fall, taking a student's coursework and photos with it. These drives add a twist — they encrypt everything at the USB bridge — so even a healthy disk reads as noise on its own. We repaired the drive, imaged it, and reversed the encryption to recover the files.
The My Passport was dropped while plugged in and afterwards wasn't detected by any computer. On it were a student's coursework and a large photo library, with no other copy. A portable drive that stops being seen after a fall usually has a physical fault, but the My Passport carries a second complication that shapes the whole recovery, so it was powered down and brought in rather than being repeatedly plugged in.
WD's portable drives encrypt their contents at the little USB-to-SATA bridge board inside the enclosure — and they do this by default, whether or not you ever set a password. That means the bare disk, taken out and read directly, is nothing but ciphertext: pull the platters and image them and you still can't read a single file until the encryption is undone. Any recovery has to account for the bridge, not just the disk, and the encryption keys tied to that specific unit.
First the physical fault: opened in controlled clean-air conditions, the drive showed head damage from the drop, so the head assembly was replaced with matched donor parts and the drive brought back under control. It was then imaged carefully, strong areas first and patient passes over the weak zones, to capture the maximum data from a fragile drive. All further work continued on the image.
With an image of the (still-encrypted) disk, the encryption was addressed: the keys held by the drive's own bridge electronics were recovered and used to decrypt the image, turning the noise back into a readable volume. From there the file system was rebuilt and the coursework and photos extracted with names and folders intact. Where a few sectors on the worst-hit area couldn't be read, the affected files were pinpointed so the student knew exactly what was complete.
Files were opened across the recovered set to confirm they were usable, then returned on fresh media. About 96% came back, including the coursework and the bulk of the photo library. We made the point that portable, encrypted drives are convenient but fragile and opaque — a single fall can lock everything away — so a second, separate copy of anything important is well worth keeping.
Clean-air head-stack replacement with matched donor parts · adaptive imaging · recovery of bridge encryption keys and decryption of the image · file-system rebuild. Physical work and imaging carried out in-house in Belfast.
Send it to us for a free, no-obligation diagnostic. We’ll tell you what can be recovered and put a fixed price in writing before any work starts — and on most jobs, if we can’t get your data back, there’s nothing to pay. Post your device in, or drop it to us by appointment.
Usually, yes. We diagnose the fault (often physical after a drop), repair the drive, and — because these drives encrypt at the bridge — recover the encryption keys to decrypt the data. Both steps are routine for us.
It makes recovery more involved but not impossible. WD encrypts by default, so the bare disk reads as noise; we recover the keys from the drive's own electronics and decrypt the image. A password you set, if any, still helps.
No — with these drives the case and its bridge are part of the recovery, and opening a sealed drive outside clean conditions risks the platters. Keep it intact and send it in.