Western Digital provides more of the storage found in British homes and offices than any other name, and its drives have ways of failing that are particular to that brand. A My Passport locked to its own bridge board. A slow array dragged to a crawl by a shingled Red. An Elements that shucks cleanly when a Passport never will. Any individual WD drive costs £300 + VAT, and the diagnostic that lets you know exactly which fault you have is free.
Any one Western Digital drive will cost you £300 + VAT, and finding out what is wrong with it costs nothing. The drive types included within this price would be a My Passport, a My Book, a WD Elements or a bare Blue, Black or Red taken out of a machine. Multi-disk units and My Cloud boxes are priced as arrays, starting from £500 + VAT.
Western Digital storage covers anything from the pocket-sized My Passport to the Ultrastar disks in a server rack, and the symptoms listed here turn up at this bench in roughly that order of how often they occur. In itself, none of these symptoms will tell you whether it is the electronics, the firmware or the mechanism that is faulty, which is exactly what the free diagnostic is there to settle.
The light shows on, the machine may or may not chime, and neither Explorer nor Disk Management shows anything at all. On a portable, most of the time it is the interface electronics at fault as opposed to the disk behind them (the better of the two answers), and you will not get a different result by trying six more ports. Every single attempt spins a possibly injured mechanism up again.
The space between the heads and the platter surface in a 2.5-inch mechanism is extremely small, so when a portable has been swept off a desk or pulled off a shelf by its cable, it will often tick away in a slow, regular pattern from that moment on. Cut the power at once. The ticking drive is damaging itself for every second it stays switched on, and every retry costs surface that you can never get back.
"You need to format the disk in drive E before you can use it", on a WD Elements that functioned perfectly well the day before. The volume header or the file table has been damaged, usually by an interruption during a write or a cable being pulled out while a copy was running. The files themselves remain where they were. Decline the offer, unplug it and do not let any tool try to repair the disk.
More often than not, mains-powered 3.5-inch units fail at the power stage long before they ever fail on the platters. A drive that spins up, clicks over once and then goes silent, or one that cycles every few seconds, is usually short of good, clean current rather than being mechanically finished. The wrong adaptor pulled out of a drawer is a very common cause, and an expensive one too.
A transfer that runs happily and then sits at forty per cent for over an hour means either the drive is struggling to get clean reads on some of its sectors, or a shingled model is busy rewriting bands in the background. In any case, dragging folders across in a file manager is the worst possible tool, as it makes the disk retry endlessly and heats the drive up while it does so.
A WD portable that has been put into another enclosure will show up as unreadable, and that is designed behaviour as opposed to a sign that it has failed. The same goes for a drive which reports its correct size but no recognisable file system. Both are recoverable in the ordinary run of things. However, once somebody has agreed to initialise or repair the drive, what was recoverable before is no longer recoverable.
This is the most useful part of the page, so it goes at the beginning. Take the mechanism out of a My Passport of any recent vintage, hook it up to a SATA port or to a caddy from the drawer, and the computer will identify a disk of exactly the right size but with nothing on it that it can make sense of. Some utilities go further and draw a partition table over the top of the mess, at which point the whole thing looks like a file system that has come apart. However, it has not come apart. These units encrypt every sector they store, by default, regardless of whether anybody chose to turn encryption on, and the electronics holding the key are still sitting in the empty case on your desk.
Where the key is located depends on the unit's age. In older Passports, a normal 2.5-inch SATA disk is joined by a short connector to a small interface board, and the encryption runs on that board. From roughly 2013 onwards there is no longer a separate board to find; the USB socket is soldered straight onto the drive's own controller, and the encryption engine is part of that same piece of silicon. Despite the change in design, 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, not a disaster. First, the disk is imaged. The key material is then read out of the original electronics, and if those electronics cannot be used, a matched donor board is fitted so the key chain carries across intact. Then decryption is done against the image (never against your original drive), and what comes back to you is the folder structure as you last saw it, rather than just random noise. There is one version of this that has no way through it: a password set with WD Security and since forgotten. In that case the encryption does exactly 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 easy-to-follow instruction. First, get a quote. Then keep the case, the circuit board and the screws together and send the whole unit as it is, with its cable and power supply, and if you have already taken it apart, put all the parts in that same parcel. Nothing has been ruined by opening it. The damage comes later, once a utility attempts to fix a bare encrypted disk or something gets written to 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 inside a plastic tower, and the mains supply is the part people give the least thought to and the one that causes the most trouble. These units want a specific voltage and a specific current, and a generic adaptor that happens to fit the socket will quite happily leave the drive short at the very moment it tries to spin up. What you end up with is a unit that 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 generation My Books encrypt in exactly the same way the Passports do, so the same rule about keeping the electronics with the disk applies to both. Where they differ is in what happens if the bridge dies: the 3.5-inch mechanism inside is a standard SATA drive, so once the key chain has been recovered, the disk behaves just like any other desktop disk on the bench. Some of the larger models also come in as two disks striped or mirrored inside one shell; that is a different type of job again and is priced from £500 + VAT rather than as a single drive. There is no indication on the outside of the case as to which type you have.
Not every Western Digital external is locked to its board. Historically, Elements and Easystore units came without the encryption layer, which is why they are the drives people shuck to get at the disk inside, and why one taken out of its casing will usually mount without any complaint. That makes them a useful counter-example. If a bare disk out of a WD enclosure reads fine, then you had either an Elements or an Easystore. If it reads as static, then you had a Passport or a recent My Book.
A couple of cautions go with this. First, WD has used both approaches across its range over the years, so the model number on the underside of the case gives a much clearer guide than the family name. Second, quite a few slim WD portables do not have a SATA connector at all (the USB port is part of the drive's own board), so whatever the badge says, there is nothing to plug into. If the disk you have pulled out has a USB socket on it instead of the familiar L-shaped SATA pair, stop there and put it back in the box. The disk is telling you which sort you own.
Western Digital sorts its internal disks by colour, and unlike a packaging decision, the colour is a genuine engineering choice. Knowing which one is in front of you gives some insight into how it failed, and occasionally into how quickly it needs to be switched off.
The mainstream disk: desktop towers, budget builds and the 2.5-inch drives found in older laptops. These are reliable enough in ordinary use, but the 1TB and 2TB 2.5-inch Blues are shingled, so they take a long time to image and are not very forgiving of sustained writing. The majority of the single-drive jobs booked in here wear a blue label.
The high-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 than the other disks. When one does fail, it is usually the heads or the bearings, which means head-swap bench work and 50% of the quoted figure upfront.
Designed for NAS boxes that run around the clock. The split in the naming is important: plain Red models were quietly sold as shingled disks which caused a good deal of noise in 2020, while Red Plus and Red Pro are conventional. A shingled disk in an array being rebuilt is slow and under stress, and that situation ends badly more often than it should.
Surveillance duty in DVR and NVR boxes, designed to record several video streams continuously and to keep going rather than stop for error handling. They are worked harder than any other consumer line, and when they arrive here they are worn out rather than broken. A disk out of a recorder is priced in the £400 + VAT recorder band, as opposed to the single-drive band.
The enterprise end, which is also the part of the range that traces straight back to HGST. Typically these come out of servers, rackmount arrays and small business storage, usually as one member of a set rather than on their own. If a set arrives together, the job is an array rebuild from £500 + VAT, priced by the number of disks.
Green was the old low-power line, retired years ago and folded back into Blue, and Green and Blue 2.5-inch mechanisms are what you will find inside the Passport enclosures of that era. The good news is that they run slowly and they run cool. The bad news is that after ten or twelve years most of them are failing gradually rather than all at once, which is the version worth acting on early.
Shingled drives lay each track partly over its neighbour, which is how more capacity fits onto the same platter, and that 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 this in the background using a small conventional staging area on the same disk. During normal use you notice nothing beyond an occasional stall; during a recovery, however, it matters a great deal.
Two consequences follow. One is that imaging a shingled disk is slow by design and it can't be rushed, so a 2TB portable that once took four hours to copy may now take a working day and a half. The other issue 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 that it now thinks contain no data. On a conventional disk, deleted data sits and waits. On a shingled disk it has a clock running against it. So if a shingled WD Blue or a plain Red has just been formatted by mistake, the useful thing to do is switch it off within the hour, not at the weekend.
Badges follow money in this trade, so it is worth knowing which company a drive really came from, because the spare parts follow the same trail. IBM sold its disk division to Hitachi, the business operated as HGST for several years, and Western Digital bought it outright in 2012. Anything branded HGST, 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. Many people still search for HGST data recovery as if it were a separate trade. It is not, and a drive with an HGST badge is handled here exactly as any other Western Digital disk would be.
Western Digital's network devices are not simply external drives with a network socket bolted on. A My Cloud, an EX2 or EX4, a PR-series unit or an older Sentinel is essentially a small computer running Linux, 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 single one of them. If you take a disk out and plug it into a Windows machine, the machine will offer to initialise it, which is the single most damaging thing that can be done at that point. Say no. Next, get a quote first, take every disk out if you can, label each one with the bay it came from and send the whole set; if taking the disks out is not feasible, send the NAS as it stands.
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 along with Synology, QNAP and Buffalo. The same page also deals with the boxes that were quietly running as a stripe without any redundancy at all, which is more of them than most owners realise.
Western Digital sells flash memory too: the Blue SATA solid state drives, the SN-series NVMe blades found in most current laptops, and the SanDisk products that came with that acquisition. Those are worked on at a separate bench and fall into the same £300 + VAT price band, NVMe included. One thing has to be said plainly: a deleted or formatted file on a working SSD is usually beyond anybody, because the drive has been told those blocks are free and erases them itself within minutes of being left idle. If, however, the SSD has failed outright and stopped responding to commands, the odds are different and often better, which is the reverse of what most people expect.
Every Western Digital job here starts the same way. First the unit is booked in. Then it is examined on hardware built for drives that argue back, and the report closes two working days after it arrives. That report answers three questions: which of the three layers has failed, whether the encryption chain can be carried across, and what proportion of your data is realistically going to come back. Only then do you see a figure in writing, and it does not budge after that. There is no charge for getting this far, 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), all the work is done from an image and your drive is not written to at any stage. Where the failure is mechanical, the disk is opened on the head-swap bench, a matched head stack goes in, and the drive is asked for one supervised pass as opposed to being run until it fails once again. Recovered files come back on fresh media, and your original either goes back to you or is securely destroyed, based on what you have put in writing.
Some Western Digital jobs can't be done, and it is cheaper for everybody to be told that over the phone. A My Passport with a WD Security password that nobody remembers stays encrypted permanently. Overwritten data (from a full format, from a reinstall back onto the same volume, or from weeks of use after the files went missing) is lost rather than hidden, and no tool will reach underneath it. A shingled drive that has been formatted and then left turned on has been rewriting itself in the background ever since. A disk that somebody has already opened at home has usually collected the dust that finishes it off. And storage soldered directly onto a mainboard can't be removed, so there is no parcel to make up in the first place.
Any single hard drive or SSD costs £300 + VAT, NVMe blades included, and a My Passport or a My Book is priced as a single drive regardless of what the case is made of. Memory cards and USB sticks are £250 + VAT. A NAS, a RAID set or a multi-disk My Book starts at £500 + VAT and the price then rises with the member count, while a disk that came out of a CCTV or DVR recorder is £400 + VAT. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. The exceptions are electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work and physical damage to the hardware (in these cases the balance is only due if we recover your data), and DVR and forensic jobs, which are paid upfront. Therefore, for all physical work 50% of the quoted price is paid upfront, because the donor parts are bought for one specific drive rather than being held as stock for drives in general. A finished single-drive recovery normally takes 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. Once you have your quote, either over the phone or through the free online diagnostic, reception at Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH will take your drop-off Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, and no appointment is needed. The majority of this work arrives by tracked, insured post instead, from the offices surrounding 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 tell you which of the three layers has actually failed.
Branded drives are much more likely to reach this bench in the post than to be carried in. First get a quote by telephone or with our free online diagnostic; after that, a padded parcel is better protected than something carried in a rucksack on the A322, it is covered for its value whilst it is travelling, and a drive handed across a post office counter in Bracknell on the Tuesday afternoon will generally be 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 of them matter. A My Passport, a My Book, a Backup Plus or an Expansion should arrive as the entire unit, screws and all, including its cable and power supply, because the electronics inside the casing may hold the only copy of the encryption key for that drive. A disk bolted into a tower, a laptop, an iMac or a recorder should arrive bare, as nothing is dismantled at this end; with a NAS, take the disks out of the chassis if you can, labelled by bay, otherwise send the NAS. Most repair shops can free one quickly. Storage soldered directly onto the mainboard is the exception with no answer: if it will not come out there is nothing to post, and if you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
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Address it to Guildford Data Recovery. From Bracknell the drive is approximately 18 miles (about 40 minutes) down the A322 and the A3, so once you have a quote you can drop it off in person without an appointment if you would rather. Whichever route it takes, the phone call confirming arrival comes the same day, and two working days after that the free diagnostic is finished and you have a figure.
Unsure whether yours is the sort that travels in its case? Telephone 0800 689 0668 before you tape the box, or alternatively run the free online diagnostic and answer just four questions.