Recovering WD Passport drives

Well, this turned out to be an adventure. You know the story, a relative dropped their external USB drive and its all gone pop, along with pictures of their children from the day they were born.

These new WD (Western Digital) drives dispense of the old SATA drive with a USB converter setup in favour of simply replacing the SATA connector with a USB one. This poses a couple of problems when dealing with recovery, the first is that SMART status doesn't seem to be implemented, the second is that on some disks they choose to use encryption as well. The final problem is a standard one - the performance is just abysmal, USB just isn't designed for bulk transfer in the same way say SATA is, or even how Firewire was - yes the numbers are good, but real world use case performance doesn't match up.

In the case of this drive there must have been some minor damage to the cable and the USB socket, as well as what seems to be damage to the platter in the first 32MB. As ever, dd to the rescue:-

dd if=/dev/disk4 of=/Volumes/Recovery/deadhd.raw bs=4096 conv=noerror,sync

Most people that have been around any *nix will know the dd basics, but it offers a whole boatload of other features besides squirting blocks from here to there via the converter option. In this case skip any errors but keep writes in sync - i.e. insert nulls for any data that can't be read.

Hows the recovery going? Well 20 hours later its done 300GB out of its 1TB size, two areas of platter damage detected. Using strings on the raw image I can see email addresses and other data around photos - so fingers crossed I'll have at least some recovered data to hand back.

So it turns out I'm lucky with this one, scanning on the internet shows others have had to resort to soldering a SATA connection onto the board or replacing the USB controller board with a compatible SATA one and transplanting some of the chips.