An external is three things in one case: a disk, a bridge board translating it to USB, and a power path. Two of the three are not the disk, and between them they cause most of the failures — which is why an undetected external so often turns out to be an entirely healthy drive behind a dead board. Send the whole enclosure rather than opening it: on many models the encryption key lives in the case and a bare drive is unreadable without it.
$ cdr diagnose /dev/sdb → Device: WD My Passport · 2 TB USB → Status: NOT DETECTED — USB board failed → Client: confidential · Cambridge, Cambridgeshire $ cdr engineer-working → USB board: repaired · drive healthy → Encryption: key preserved · unlocked → Imaging: 1.9 TB / 2 TB · 1sectors mapped $ cdr verify → ✓ photos — 24,800 files → ✓ documents — 11,200 files → ✓ drive recovered — data back
An external drive is a small assembly, and two of its three parts are not the disk. Knowing which one has failed changes the price by several hundred pounds.
Usually a standard 2.5 or 3.5-inch mechanism from the same manufacturer that made the case. When this is what failed, it is an ordinary hard drive recovery and priced as one.
A small board converting SATA to USB. It fails at least as often as the disk, and on several ranges it also holds the encryption key. This is the part people throw away.
On 3.5-inch desktop units a separate mains adapter. On portables, a micro-USB or USB-C socket that has been knocked while plugged in. Cheap to fix and frequently the entire problem.
This is the single most expensive misunderstanding in external drive recovery, and it is entirely avoidable.
The advice circulating online is to shuck the drive — open the case, pull the bare disk out, connect it directly to a SATA port. On some enclosures that works. On several of the most common ones it destroys your access to the data permanently.
WD My Passport and My Book units encrypt at the bridge. The disk inside holds nothing but ciphertext, and the key lives on the small board you have just discarded. Connect that bare drive to a computer and it reports as unformatted, at which point Windows helpfully offers to initialise it. People accept, and a recoverable job becomes a considerably harder one.
Send the whole unit — case, board, cable and power supply if it has one. It costs nothing extra, it takes no longer, and it means we can pair your disk with its own bridge rather than reconstructing the encryption from first principles.
If the drive is already out of the case, keep the case. Do not throw away the enclosure, the board or the cable, even if the board looks dead. On an encrypting bridge that small piece of electronics is the difference between a routine recovery and an impossible one.
Which range you are holding decides whether the drive can be read directly or has to stay married to its board.
The most common presentation in this catchment, and the reason we quote turnaround before price.
A portable external is the default second copy for anyone doing research, and in a university city that makes it the primary copy far more often than it should be. What arrives here is typically a 1–4 TB USB portable, three or four years old, carrying the entire working output of a doctorate, a grant project or a small consultancy, with no cloud sync and no other copy in existence.
Two things follow. Send the whole enclosure rather than shucking it, for the reasons above. And tell us the deadline on the first call — where a submission is close we will often extract the specific chapters or datasets you need first and complete the full recovery afterwards, at no extra cost.
An external drive is from £300 +VAT, the same as any single disk. Where the fault turns out to be the bridge board rather than the mechanism, it usually sits at the lower end of the range because no clean-air work is involved.
Most jobs run no fix, no fee. Where the drive has to be opened or fitted with donor parts there is a 50% deposit, because those costs commit the moment work begins. You are told which applies before agreeing to anything.
Not necessarily, and on a good proportion of these it is not. Bridge boards, sockets and power supplies fail more often than the mechanisms behind them. A drive that is completely silent on a known-good cable and port is worth diagnosing before assuming the worst.
No. On WD My Passport and My Book ranges the encryption key sits on the bridge board, and separating the two makes the data unreadable. Send the whole unit including the cable and power supply.
No. That message means Windows cannot read the file system, which is exactly what you would expect from a bridge fault, an encrypted disk out of its case, or logical damage. Formatting would make a recoverable situation considerably worse.
That is mechanical and it is on a clock. Switch it off and do not power it up again to check. A drive knocked while spinning may have contacted the platter, and every further rotation extends the damage.
Regularly, particularly on the Seagate and Toshiba portable ranges. A sheared USB socket is a board-level repair to get one read off the drive, not a permanent fix, and it is priced as an ordinary single-drive recovery.
That is different from bridge encryption and we need the recovery key or password. Without it, no method exists. On a work machine that key is almost certainly held centrally in Azure AD or Intune, so ask before assuming.
£300 +VAT per drive, fixed in writing first. Send the unit complete with its enclosure — on a good many models the bridge board inside the case is the only thing that can decrypt the disk, and the case is the drive.