The My Passport is "connected to the laptop" but "does not show up", and makes "strange whirring/clicking sounds". She had been advised she would need a "clean room" for it, and mentioned in passing that a grandchild may have "stood on it". Both pieces of information point the same way, and the advice she was given was sound. A crush is an impact like any other — a portable drive under somebody's weight takes a shock through a head assembly flying nanometres above the platter, and the heads come off worse than the case does. The whirring is the platters turning; the clicking is the heads unable to read them. That combination is opened under a laminar-flow hood or not at all.
| Media | A WD My Passport Ultra 2TB holding family photographs, connected but never appearing, producing whirring and clicking sounds. Possibly stood on. |
| Reported situation | WD My Passport Ultra 2TB · family photographs · connects to the laptop but does not show up · whirring and clicking · advised elsewhere that a clean-room recovery is needed · possibly stood on by a grandchild · no particular urgency. |
| Fault class | Head fault following a crush — the platters spin, producing the whirring, while the head assembly fails to read and retries, producing the clicking. Photographs intact on the platters; the hazard is entirely in further power. |
| Equipment used | Not powered further once the clicking was described · taken out of its enclosure and measured on a current-limited bench supply, the noise characterised · opened beneath laminar flow in filtered clean air, examined beneath a stereo microscope, a matched donor head set fitted and aligned · imaged out to DeepSpar with PC-3000 UDMA behind it, the photographs picked out in R-Studio and confirmed by rendering. |
It is worth confirming the earlier advice rather than talking round it, because people are often told they need a clean room and then quietly suspect they are being softened up for a bill. They are not. A drive that whirs and clicks has a head fault, and a head fault is dealt with by opening the drive and replacing the head assembly. That has to happen in filtered air under laminar flow, because a single particle of household dust is many times larger than the gap the heads fly in, and a particle on the platter becomes an abrasive the moment things start turning.
The crush explains it neatly. People think of drops, but standing on a portable drive delivers a comparable shock in a different direction, and the drive does not much care which. Portable units have very little internal protection — they are a bare 2.5-inch mechanism in a plastic shell — so a foot on a drive lying on a carpet is entirely sufficient to knock a head assembly out of true.
The photographs themselves are in the least dramatic position of anyone involved. They are recorded on the platters, the platters are still turning, and the fault is above them. The one thing that would genuinely endanger them is continuing to plug the drive in to see whether it appears this time. She said there was no great urgency, which is the ideal answer: the drive goes in a padded box exactly as it is, and the free diagnostic tells her what she is dealing with inside 2 working days of it arriving.
It was not plugged in again. Taken out of its enclosure and set on a current-limited bench supply, the whirring and the clicking were characterised without letting the drive run on. It was opened in filtered air under laminar flow, and the head assembly and platter surfaces were examined under a stereo microscope with particular attention to the area where a crush would have loaded the heads onto the surface. Matched donor heads were fitted, the alignment set, and imaging ran on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA in controlled passes, with the photographs located in R-Studio and rendered.
Head assembly replaced in filtered clean air, the drive imaged, and the family photographs put onto fresh media. The diagnostic cost nothing; the figure that followed was fixed, written and inclusive of VAT. Because the drive had to be opened, 50% of that figure was payable in advance against the donor parts and the bench time, with the balance falling due only once the pictures were proven back. Whoever gave her the original advice deserves the credit for the outcome, since the drive arrived unplugged and unmolested.
Take the advice — it is not a sales line. Whirring plus clicking means the platters are turning and the heads are not reading, and the only route to your photographs is to open the drive and fit a matched head assembly under laminar flow, where the air is filtered finely enough that nothing settles on the surface. What you should not do in the meantime is keep connecting it to see whether it appears, because each attempt drags failing heads across the recording surface. And if something heavy went over it, say so when you ring, even if the case looks perfectly fine: a portable drive is a bare mechanism in a plastic shell, and being stood on does the same job as a drop from a table.
Every case file here is written up from a real enquiry handled for households and businesses across Norwich and Norfolk, anonymised so that nobody is identifiable. Each sets out the reasoning behind the diagnosis and the method used on that particular fault, with the equipment named.
The noise is the diagnosis — heads that can no longer read, and every retry costs you surface
He had already worked it out — a clicking drive has no way of announcing itself, so Windows is shown nothing whatever
The shutdown is the drive admitting defeat — it cannot ready its heads, so it stops trying and steps back
Diagnosis costs nothing and takes up to 2 working days from arrival, the quote is fixed in writing, and logical work runs no fix, no fee — start online or ring the freephone.