Is my WD Passport HD dead?

So I plug in the HD to finally backup all my pictures to dvds and it doesn't work. It last worked 1 week ago with no issues. Now all I get is a message saying that I need to format it to use it. I tried running the WD data lifeguard diagnostic and it failed saying that there are too many bad sectors.

Is there anyway to rescue my files and picture collection from this thing?

Thanks in advance

WD drives came up a few weeks ago in a thread started by me. I've had two of them and both have failed - one after 9 months. I stick to Seagates now.

you could always try pulling it from the enclosure and either putting in another, or mounting it in your computer.

You could try other software... for example, SpinRite:
http://www.grc.com/int​ro.htm

Never tried it myself, and its not exactly cheap, but some respectable tech guys (like Leo Laporte, of ScreenSavers and Call For Help fame) recommend it.

thanks for the help guys. wish I knew about the WD issue before hand. Hope it doesn't happen to my 350gig book too.

regards.

If the disk is dead and nothing else is working... and drive is no longer spinning...

Note: Following may destroy your drive forever, bryond repair. Use the following technique at your own risk.

Put the drive in a sealed plaster bag with wrapped tightly. Put it in the freezer for 4-6 hours. Take it out and immidiately plug it in and see if it spins and try to copy your data out.

I had one of these go south on me with the same error. I was able to recover it using a disk called Hiren's Bootcd. There was a program on there that was actually able to read the corrupted file allocation table and at least recover the data to another drive, but the drive was toast from that point. I honestly can't remember the name of the app right now.

It would spin up and format, but it wasn't able to write data out to the drive for more than a few minutes without failing and causing the disk to disappear from my computer and have to be power reset to even show up again. I ended up tossing the drive as it was out of warranty (got the drive from a friend for some computer/web work I did for him) and didn't have the receipt. Luckily I only lost a small amount of data (various music files and clip art files that I had downloaded and a few pictures that I had backed up elsewhere). If you still have the receipt for the drive, you might want to see if it's within the warranty and get it replaced.

I've had good luck with WD My Books. I've got a 250 and a 500 that are going strong. As with any backup solution, it's only as good as the drive it's on. My photos are backed up onto 3 different drives on a weekly basis so at most I'll only lose what I should still have on my memory card for the camera.

Not a WD, but I recently had a Maxtor One Touch III 500GB external stop working and I was freaked. It had over 3000 shots from a weekend of dance recitals, only half of which were still on my PD7X.

Fortunately it turned out to be the USB/IDE adapter board inside the enclosure that was bad. The drive and all its contents were intact.

If you are out of warranty, or if like me you must have the data, pick up another enclosure and try swapping the drive into the new enclosure.

Good luck.