Devices · portable & external drives
A portable drive gets treated worse than anything bolted inside a computer, and it carries an extra part no internal disk has: a USB bridge that can fail on its own account. Both faults are bench work. Neither is a job for guesswork at home.
Run the problem past an engineer
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| What appears | What's behind it | First move |
|---|---|---|
| You need to format the disk in drive X: before you can use it | RAW after a cable came out mid-write — the files underneath it are all still there | Don't press Format |
| USB device not recognized — the last USB device you connected malfunctioned | Nothing is identifying itself: bridge or disk | One more cable, then leave it alone |
| Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) — Code 43 | The device never tells Windows what it is | The bridge board — bench job |
| The drive is not accessible. Data error (cyclic redundancy check) | Bad sectors on the disk inside the case | Leave it unplugged |
| Not Initialized, or RAW, in Disk Management | Windows can't read the layout, so it offers to wipe it | Refuse — initialising ends the job |
| One of the USB devices attached to this computer has malfunctioned | Power or bridge failure inside the caddy | The board fails far oftener than the disk |
Every item gets its own case number on the day it lands here. An engineer traces the fault, gives you a plain assessment of what is realistically recoverable, and puts one fixed price in writing. The diagnosis is free, you are under no obligation, and chargeable work starts only when you say go.
First we decide whether the case failed or the disk did. Plenty of dead externals — LaCie and Iomega boxes especially — are a sound disk stuck behind a dead bridge.
A great many externals, WD's above all, do their encrypting on the bridge board rather than the disk. Lifting the keys off your own board is the step that turns a case of unreadable noise back into files with names on them.
A sector-by-sector clone is taken on our hardware imagers. Your folders go back together from that copy, and the result travels home on new media, postage paid by us.
You get the full list of recovered files first, and nothing is charged until you approve it. Data goes back on fresh media, return postage paid, and the job stays open on our side until you confirm every file opens at your end.
For the record: SanDisk's 2TB and 4TB Extreme portables shed files without warning through 2023, the complaints became a US class action against Western Digital, and the firmware update issued along the way did not settle it. One of those playing up belongs on an imager this week.
The clicking began nine days out from a dissertation deadline. Donor heads went in, the imaging was taken slowly, and the encryption keys were lifted from the USB bridge — every chapter and every reference came back with days in hand.
Send the lot, smashed casing included. Plenty of external drives keep their encryption keys on the USB bridge board; lose that board and even a perfectly good disk reads as gibberish.
No. The message means the file system cannot be read, not that your files have gone. Formatting writes over the structures a rebuild depends on.
Posting a drive is hard on it — vibration, knocks, temperature all over the place. One that was already close to failing will often die the first time it gets power at the lab. We see that most weeks.
Nearly always. Forget the plastic shell; what matters is the disk within, the state of its board, and whether enough life remains in the bridge chip for it to give up the encryption keys.
Switch a failing device on again and you lose a little more. Open a case before you do — the diagnosis is free, whatever it finds.