Devices · external & portable drives
Portable drives lead harder lives than anything inside a computer, and they bring one more part to the party — a USB bridge with failures all of its own. Either problem is fixable on a bench, and from Exeter ours is one tracked parcel away. Guesswork at home tends not to be.
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| What it says | What it usually means | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| You need to format the disk in drive X: before you can use it | RAW usually follows a cable pulled mid-write — the files themselves haven't gone anywhere | Leave the Format button alone |
| USB device not recognized — the last USB device you connected malfunctioned | Neither bridge nor disk is announcing itself | One different cable, then no more attempts |
| Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) — Code 43 | Without a descriptor, Windows can't tell what the device is | Bridge trouble — one for the bench |
| The drive is not accessible. Data error (cyclic redundancy check) | Bad-sector damage on the drive inside the caddy | Keep it disconnected |
| Disk Management shows Not Initialized or RAW | Windows can't read it, so it offers to wipe it | Say no — initialising destroys it |
| One of the USB devices attached to this computer has malfunctioned | Either the caddy's power or its bridge board has failed | More often the board than the drive |
Your device is logged under its own case number the day it arrives. An engineer finds the fault, tells you plainly what stands a real chance of coming back, and writes you one fixed quote. Nothing is charged for that look, nothing obliges you, and paid work starts only when you say so.
Step one separates enclosure trouble from drive trouble — many a 'dead external', ageing LaCie and Iomega boxes included, is a healthy disk behind a dead bridge.
Many externals — WD's above all — encrypt inside the bridge board rather than the drive. The keys are recovered from your original board, which is what turns an unreadable sector soup back into your actual files.
A sector-level clone is taken on hardware imagers; the folder tree is rebuilt from that copy, and the results travel back to you on new media, postage paid.
Before any fee falls due you see a full listing of everything recovered and approve it. Your files travel back on brand-new media, return postage on us, and the case stays open until you've confirmed everything opens on your own machine.
For the record: the SanDisk Extreme trouble of 2023 saw 2TB and 4TB portables losing files without notice, put Western Digital in front of a class action, and outlived the firmware update meant to cure it. A misbehaving one belongs on an imager today.
Nine days before a dissertation deadline, the drive started clicking. We fitted donor heads, imaged it gently, carried the encryption keys over from the USB bridge — and every chapter and citation was home with time to spare.
Send everything, broken case and all. On many externals the USB bridge board carries the encryption keys — without that board a healthy drive gives you nothing but scrambled reads.
No. What the message tells you is that the file system has become unreadable — not that there is nothing on the drive. Formatting writes over exactly the structures a rebuild depends on.
A drive has a rough time in transit: vibration, knocks, temperature swinging up and down. One that was already failing before posting often gives out the first time power hits it at the lab. It's a story we hear week in, week out.
Almost every time. The caddy itself is throwaway — what matters is the drive inside, the state of its PCB, and whether the bridge chip still works well enough to give up its encryption keys.
Each power-up of a failing device takes more data with it. Open a case first — the look-over is free whichever way it goes.