Western Digital covers more of the storage in British homes and offices than any other name, and its drives fail in ways that are particular to the brand. A My Passport locked to its own bridge board. A shingled Red slowing an array to a crawl. An Elements that shucks cleanly when a Passport never will. Any single WD drive is £300 + VAT, and the diagnostic that tells you which fault you have is free.
Any single Western Digital drive is £300 + VAT, and finding out what is wrong with it costs nothing. That covers a My Passport, a My Book, a WD Elements or a bare Blue, Black or Red out of a machine. Multi-disk units and My Cloud boxes are priced as arrays from £500 + VAT.
Western Digital storage covers everything from a pocket-sized My Passport to the Ultrastar disks in a server rack, and the symptoms below arrive at this bench in roughly that order of frequency. None of them tells you on its own whether the fault is in the electronics, the firmware or the mechanism, which is exactly what the free diagnostic exists to settle.
The light comes on, the machine may or may not chime, and nothing turns up in Explorer or in Disk Management. On a portable this is usually the interface electronics rather than the disk behind them, which is the better of the two answers. Plugging it into six more ports will not change it, and every attempt spins a possibly injured mechanism up again.
A 2.5-inch mechanism leaves very little room between the heads and the platter surface, so a portable that has been swept off a desk or pulled off a shelf by its cable often ticks in a slow, regular pattern from that moment. Cut the power at once. A ticking drive is damaging itself for as long as it is switched on, and each retry costs surface that cannot be given back.
You need to format the disk in drive E before you can use it, on a WD Elements that worked yesterday. The volume header or the file table has been damaged, usually by an interrupted write or a cable pulled during a copy. The files themselves are still where they were. Decline the offer, unplug it and do not let any tool repair the disk.
Mains-powered 3.5-inch units fail at the power stage far more often than they fail on the platters. A drive that spins up, clicks over once and drops silent, or one that cycles every few seconds, is usually short of clean current rather than mechanically finished. The wrong adaptor from a drawer is a common cause and an expensive one.
A transfer that runs happily and then sits at forty per cent for an hour means the drive is fighting for sectors it cannot read cleanly, or that a shingled model is busy rewriting bands in the background. Either way, dragging folders in a file manager is the worst possible tool: it retries endlessly and heats the drive while it does.
A WD portable moved into another enclosure will show up as unreadable, and that is designed behaviour rather than damage. So is a drive that reports the right capacity and no recognisable file system. Both are recoverable in the ordinary run of things. What is not recoverable is a drive somebody then agreed to initialise or repair.
This is the most useful thing on the page, so it goes first. Open a My Passport of any recent vintage, lift the mechanism out and connect it to a SATA port or to a caddy from the drawer, and the computer will announce a disk of exactly the right size containing nothing it can make sense of. Some tools go further and draw a partition table over the top of the mess, which makes the whole thing look like a file system that has come apart. It has not. Those units encrypt every sector they store, by default, whether or not anybody chose to switch encryption on, and the electronics holding the key are the electronics still sitting in the empty case on the desk.
Where that key lives depends on the age of the unit. Older Passports contain a normal 2.5-inch SATA disk joined by a short connector to a small interface board, and the encryption runs on that board. From roughly 2013 onwards there is no separate board to find: the USB socket is soldered straight onto the drive's own controller and the encryption engine is part of the same piece of silicon. The practical rule is identical in both cases. The platters and the electronics in front of them are one instrument, and taking them apart leaves you holding half of it.
On the bench this is ordinary work rather than a disaster. The disk is imaged first, the key material is read out of the original electronics, and where those electronics are beyond use a matched donor board is fitted so the key chain carries across intact. Decryption then happens against the image, never against your drive, and what comes back is the folder structure you last saw rather than noise. There is one version of this with no route through it: a password set with WD Security and since forgotten. The encryption then does precisely what it was sold to do, and no laboratory in the country can undo it. Encrypted drive recovery sets out that boundary in full.
All of which produces one simple instruction. Keep the case, the board and the screws together, send the whole unit as it is, and if you have already taken it apart, put the parts in the same parcel. Nothing has been ruined by opening it. The damage comes later, from writing to a bare encrypted disk or letting a utility try to fix it. The shorter version of this section lives on external drive recovery alongside the other portable makes.
A My Book is a 3.5-inch disk, a bridge board and a mains supply in a plastic tower, and the mains supply is the part that gets the fewest thoughts and causes the most trouble. These units want a specific voltage and a specific current, and the generic adaptor that fits the socket will happily leave the drive short at the moment it tries to spin up. That produces a unit which resets mid-write, week after week, until the file system is a mass of half-finished transactions. Untangling that is straightforward once a complete image exists, and impossible while the drive keeps being asked to try again.
The later My Book generations encrypt in the same way the Passports do, so the same rule about keeping the electronics with the disk applies. Where they differ is what happens when the bridge dies: a 3.5-inch mechanism inside is a standard SATA drive, so once the key chain has been recovered the disk itself behaves like any other desktop disk on the bench. Some of the larger models also arrive here as two disks striped or mirrored inside one shell, which is a different job again and is priced from £500 + VAT rather than as a single drive. Nothing on the outside of the case says which you have.
Not every Western Digital external is locked to its board. Elements and Easystore units have historically shipped without the encryption layer, which is why they are the drives people shuck for the disk inside and why one taken out of its shell will usually mount without complaint. That makes them the useful counter-example: if a bare disk out of a WD enclosure reads normally, you had an Elements or an Easystore. If it reads as static, you had a Passport or a recent My Book.
Two cautions go with that. The first is that WD has used both approaches across the range over the years, and the model number on the underside of the case is a better guide than the family name. The second is that a good number of slim WD portables have no SATA connector at all, because the USB port is part of the drive's own board, so there is nothing to plug into whatever the badge says. If the disk you have pulled out has a USB socket on it rather than the familiar L-shaped SATA pair, stop there and put it back in the box. It is telling you which sort you own.
Western Digital sorts its internal disks by colour, and the colour is a genuine engineering decision rather than packaging. Knowing which one is in front of you explains a good deal about how it failed, and occasionally about how quickly it needs to be switched off.
The mainstream disk: desktop towers, budget builds, and the 2.5-inch drives in older laptops. Reliable enough in ordinary use, but the 1TB and 2TB 2.5-inch Blues are shingled, which makes them slow to image and unforgiving of sustained writing. The bulk of the single-drive work booked in here wears a blue label.
The performance line: 7200rpm, conventional recording rather than shingled, and a longer warranty. Blacks tend to fail mechanically rather than gradually, because they run hotter and are asked to work harder. When one goes it is usually heads or bearings, which means clean-bench work and 50% of the quoted figure upfront.
Built for NAS boxes running around the clock. The split in the naming matters: plain Red models were quietly shipped as shingled drives, which caused a good deal of noise in 2020, while Red Plus and Red Pro are conventional. A shingled disk in a rebuilding array is slow and stressed, and that combination ends badly more often than it should.
Surveillance duty in DVR and NVR boxes, tuned to write several video streams continuously and to keep going rather than pause for error handling. They are worked harder than any other consumer line and they arrive here worn rather than broken. A disk out of a recorder is priced in the £400 + VAT recorder band, not the single-drive band.
The enterprise end, and the part of the range that traces straight back to HGST. These come out of servers, rackmount arrays and small business storage, usually as one member of a set rather than on their own. Where a set arrives together the job is an array rebuild from £500 + VAT, priced by the number of disks.
Green was the low-power line, retired years ago and folded back into Blue, and Green and Blue 2.5-inch mechanisms are what you find inside Passport enclosures of that era. They are slow, they are cool-running, and after ten or twelve years they are usually failing by degrees rather than all at once, which is the version worth acting on early.
Shingled drives lay each track partly over its neighbour to squeeze more capacity onto the same platter, which works well until something has to be rewritten in the middle of a band. The drive then has to shuffle a whole group of tracks, and it does that in the background using a small conventional staging area on the same disk. In normal use you notice nothing beyond an occasional stall. In a recovery it matters a great deal.
Two consequences follow. The first is that imaging a shingled disk is slow by design and cannot be hurried, so a 2TB portable that would once have copied in four hours may take a working day and a half. The second is more serious: after a delete or a format, that background shuffling can genuinely destroy old content rather than merely unlinking it, because the drive is free to rewrite whole bands it now believes are empty. On a conventional disk, deleted data sits and waits. On a shingled one it has a clock running against it. If a shingled WD Blue or a plain Red has just been formatted by mistake, the useful action is to switch it off within the hour, not at the weekend.
Badges follow money in this trade, and it is worth knowing which company a drive really came from because spare parts follow the same trail. IBM sold its disk division to Hitachi, the business ran for years as HGST, and Western Digital bought it outright in 2012. Anything wearing an HGST label, and every Ultrastar sold since, is a Western Digital product in all the ways that count on a bench: the donor stock, the firmware families and the head designs all belong to that lineage. People still search for HGST data recovery as though it were a separate trade. It is not, and a drive with that badge is handled here exactly as any other Western Digital disk would be.
Western Digital's network boxes are not externals with a network socket bolted on. A My Cloud, an EX2 or EX4, a PR-series unit or an older Sentinel is a small Linux computer with its own file system, and on the multi-bay models the volume is spread across the disks by software rather than sitting whole on any one of them. Take a disk out, plug it into a Windows machine, and the machine will offer to initialise it, which is the single most damaging thing that can be done at that point. Say no, take every disk out, label which bay each one came from, and send the set.
That work is priced as an array rather than as a single drive, from £500 + VAT and rising with the number of members, and it is covered properly on NAS drive recovery alongside Synology, QNAP and Buffalo. The same page deals with the boxes that were quietly running as a stripe with no redundancy at all, which is more of them than most owners realise.
Western Digital sells flash as well: the Blue SATA solid state drives, the SN-series NVMe blades inside most current laptops, and the SanDisk products that came with that acquisition. Those are worked on a separate bench and priced in the same £300 + VAT band, NVMe included. What has to be said plainly is that a deleted or formatted file on a working SSD is usually beyond anybody, because the drive is told those blocks are free and erases them itself within minutes of being left idle. Where the SSD has failed outright and stopped accepting commands the odds are different and often better, which is the opposite of what most people expect.
Every Western Digital job here starts the same way. The unit is booked in, examined on hardware built for drives that argue back, and the report closes two working days after arrival. That report answers three questions: which of the three layers has failed, whether the encryption chain can be carried across, and what proportion of the data is realistically going to come back. Only then does a figure appear, in writing, and it does not move afterwards. Nothing is charged for reaching that point, and nobody is talked into a recovery that the report says is not worth doing.
Where the fault is logical — a deleted folder, a format, a file table that has come apart, a partition that vanished — the work happens on an image and your drive is not written to at any stage. Where it is mechanical, the disk is opened under filtered air on a clean bench, a matched head stack goes in, and it is asked for a single supervised pass rather than being run until it fails again. Recovered files come back on fresh media, and the original goes back to you or is destroyed securely, whichever you put in writing.
Some Western Digital jobs cannot be done, and it is cheaper for everybody to hear that on the telephone. A My Passport with a WD Security password nobody remembers stays encrypted permanently. Data that has been overwritten — by a full format, by a reinstall onto the same volume, by weeks of use after the files went missing — is gone rather than hidden, and no tool reaches underneath it. A shingled drive that has been formatted and then left running has been rewriting itself in the background ever since. A disk somebody has already opened outside a clean-air bench has usually collected the dust that finishes it. And storage soldered directly onto a mainboard cannot be removed, so there is no parcel to make up in the first place.
Any single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT, NVMe blades included, and a My Passport or a My Book is a single drive for pricing whatever the case is made of. Memory cards and USB sticks are £250 + VAT. A NAS, a RAID set or a multi-disk My Book opens at £500 + VAT and rises with the member count, and a disk that came out of a CCTV or DVR recorder is £400 + VAT. No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Physical work therefore takes 50% of the quoted price upfront, because donor parts are bought for one specific drive rather than kept as stock for drives in general. A finished single-drive recovery normally runs 2 to 4 working days from the point you approve the quote.
The bench is at Guildford Business Park, roughly 40 minutes down the A322 and the A3, and reception takes drop-offs Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm. Most of this work arrives by post instead, from the offices around the Lexicon and the business parks off the A329(M), from Wokingham, Crowthorne, Ascot and Sandhurst, and from households in Warfield and Binfield whose photographs live on a single Passport that has stopped mounting. If the drive is a Seagate rather than a WD, the same bench handles it and the Seagate page covers what is different about them. If you are not sure which fault you are looking at, drive not detected and clicking drive recovery describe the two most common of them, and the price list publishes every band in full.
Leave it switched off, keep the case and the board together, and let the free diagnostic say which of the three layers actually failed.
Branded drives reach this bench in the post far more often than they are carried in. A padded parcel is steadier than a rucksack on the A322, it is covered for its value while it travels, and a drive handed across a post office counter in Bracknell on the Tuesday afternoon is normally logged in at Guildford on the Wednesday.
An external goes in its own case. An internal comes out of the machine first. Those two rules pull in opposite directions and both matter. A My Passport, a My Book, a Backup Plus or an Expansion should arrive complete, screws and all, because the electronics in the shell may hold the only copy of the encryption key. A disk bolted into a tower, a laptop, an iMac, a NAS chassis or a recorder should arrive bare, since nothing is dismantled at this end. Any repair shop will free one in a few minutes. Storage soldered flat to a mainboard is the exception with no answer: if it will not come out, there is nothing to post.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Guildford Data Recovery. From Bracknell the drive is about 18 miles and 40 minutes away down the A322 and the A3 if you would rather deliver it yourself. Whichever route it takes, the telephone call confirming arrival comes the same day, and two working days later the free diagnostic is finished and you have a figure.
Unsure whether yours is the sort that travels in its case? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you tape the box, or run the free online diagnostic and answer four questions instead.