External HDD making clicking noise and not being recognized

[Tigro]

I have WD Passport external HDD and yesterday, when I was transferring some photos to it, the transfer suddenly stopped. I thought nothing of it, retried a few times - nothing. So I restarted my PC and after that, the drive didn't work anymore. When you connect it to a PC, the white LED keeps blinking all the time and for a minute or so, the disk makes an intermittent clicking noise. After that, it becomes pretty silent or makes its regular, pretty quiet shuffling sound (though the LED keeps blinking all the time).

When you plug it in, the PC does recognize it in some way, though, because you can hear the sound of a new USB device being connected and see it listed as a USB device (WD Hard Drive) in the system tray. It's not visible in the explorer, though, and recovery software like Kroll OnTrack does see it as some "unrecognized drive" but can't start recovery because neither its Scan or Deep Scan features find any partitions. I've also tried the Disk Management tool that's built into Windows but it only shows it as an unrecognized drive, asking whether I want to initialize it because it claims it's not yet initialized.

What else may I try? I'd really like to get the files out of it because these are basically all my photos and videos from the past years Having it restored by professionals, on the other hand, would be madly expensive. I've tried different USB ports, different machines (desktop PC, laptop, Mac laptop) but all to no avail. I've also thought about connecting it straight to my motherboard but after removing the enclosure, the connectors look like thisso I don't even think that's possible without some soldering. Is there anything else you'd recommend that may help get the data out of the drive?

 

[pclab]

Well, without proper tools it's not easy to diagnose it, but I would say that probably one (or more) head is failing.
You can convert the USB PCB to a SATA PCB (we have some topics here about that), but do it on your own risk.
It might be an easy case, if for instance you could be only interested on a partial recovery (if the head problem is also confirmed), by doing a recovery from the remaining heads.
Where are you located?

 

[Blizzard]

WD Passports are very susceptible to damage when transported, bumped, or dropped. It doesn't take much to make them fail but they are very resilient and easy to recover. Quite often they are easily recovered, using proper hardware based tools, by simply converting them to SATA and avoiding the USB interface. However, I do not recommend trying DIY if the data is irreplaceable. If you are close to Jared (Data Medics) why not send him a PM and get a quote. You might be surprised how affordable recovery can be for a WD Passport.

 

[Tigro]

Thank you both the replies. Do you think I should try buying a new cable as the last option for doing something on my own before turning to a professional (which I currently am unable to pay for so the HDD will have to wait in the drawer for a few months before I save up anyway) or is there no way that simply trying a new USB3 micro B connector would be enough?

Where are you located?

Poland

 

[pclab]

I don't think that a new cable will do the trick.
Better to keep it save and try to send it to a professional.

If you ware willing to send it to Portugal, I can take a look at it.