As with most “computer” guys (and gals), I often get asked to look at computer problems. This latest one has been interesting. A friend overseas had their USB hard disk (WD My Passport Ultra) fail so she shipped it to me to take a look at. When I plugged it into a Mac I got nothing, however the device did show up in the system report. Next I plugged it into a Linux box and got some strange errors in the kernel log about not being able to set the device configuration. I looked on the WD web site and found there was a firmware update for the drive but it could only be applied from a Windows machine, so I booted up my Windows machine and ran the firmware update. Just before the update finished the drive suddenly popped into the explorer window. I followed the instructions in the firmware updater and shut down the machine, unplugged the device and booted up again. Unfortunately the device didn’t come up after doing this. I decided to have another go with the firmware updater and this time I did not shut down and so while the device is available I am madly copying as much data off as I can.
Initially I tried using the Windows explorer to copy the files, but since there were so many FS errors and timeouts this didn’t work so well. What I eventually ended up doing was writing a little C# app to copy the files and ignore as many errors as I can. So far it seems to be working. The drive appears to be running VERY slowly, but still actually reading the data. Strangely some files are copying at the expected speed. It’s very weird. My guess is this drive is very sick.