Devices · USB and portable drives
An external drive carries a component an internal disk does not: a USB bridge between the port and the disk, which fails on its own account and often holds the encryption keys. Add the handling a bag gives it and two separate faults have to be told apart, both of them bench work once the drive reaches us from Maidenhead.
Describe the fault to an engineer
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| The symptom | The likely cause | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| You need to format the disk in drive X: before you can use it | A cable pulled mid-write left the volume RAW; the files below it are intact | Do not click Format |
| USB device not recognized — the last device you connected malfunctioned | Nothing announces itself — bridge or disk | Try one other cable, then stop |
| Code 43 — Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) | The device never declares itself to Windows | Bridge electronics — bench work |
| Data error (cyclic redundancy check) — the drive is not accessible | Failing sectors on the disk within the case | Unplug it and stop |
| Disk Management shows RAW, or Not Initialized | Windows cannot parse the partition layout, so it offers a wipe | Decline — initialising ends it |
| Windows says a USB device attached to this computer has malfunctioned | The caddy's power rail or bridge has gone | Boards fail a good deal more often than disks |
Nothing becomes chargeable until you have said yes to it. Each item takes a case number of its own the moment it arrives, an engineer establishes what has actually failed, and you are given a candid view of which files stand a realistic chance of returning. The single quote that follows is fixed, written down, and costs nothing.
The first question here is whether the enclosure failed or the disk did. Many dead externals — LaCie and Iomega boxes among them — hold a sound disk behind failed electronics.
Where the encrypting happens matters more than whether you chose it. On most externals it is done in the bridge, so the keys travel with the board, not the disk. Lifting them off turns unreadable sectors into named folders.
Hardware imagers take a sector-level clone first, your folder structure is reassembled from that clone alone, and what comes out travels back on fresh media at our expense.
Nothing is billed until you have seen the recovered file list in full and told us to go ahead. What comes back arrives on new media, with the return journey at our cost, and the case stays open at this end until you have opened every file yourself.
Worth knowing: through 2023 SanDisk's 2TB and 4TB Extreme portables began losing files with no warning at all, the complaints hardened into a US class action naming Western Digital, and a firmware update pushed out mid-dispute settled nothing. If you own one that is misbehaving, get it imaged now.
Nine days out from the hand-in date, the drive began to tick. A donor head stack went in, the image was taken at a deliberately slow rate, and the bridge board gave up its encryption keys; the thesis went back complete, references and all, with a week to spare.
No — send everything, broken shell and all. A great many external drives put the encryption on the USB bridge itself, not on the disk, and without that board a healthy disk reads as nothing but noise.
Never. The prompt reports only that the file system will not parse, and says nothing about your files. Accepting it overwrites the structures a rebuild works from.
A journey through the post is punishing: vibration, handling and swings of temperature all at once. A drive already near the end of its life will often give out the first time it is powered up here. We see it most weeks.
Almost always. The shell itself counts for little; what matters is the condition of the disk inside, the state of its own electronics, and whether the bridge chip retains enough life to surrender its keys.
Each further power-up asks more of a drive that has already begun to fail. Open the case first and let the free diagnosis tell you what is left.