# WD USB device issues (not FreeBSD?)



## fluca1978 (May 22, 2012)

Hello all,

A few days ago a Western Digital hard disk of mine, which is attached via USB, stopped working. It turned out to be a power issue, and therefore it _seems_ that my data is still there, but while trying another USB bay I found a strange issue. The product is _WDBAAU0010HBX_ while the disk is a _WD10EADS_.

This is what is reported when the disk is attached to another external bay:


```
da1 at umass-sim1 bus 1 scbus5 target 0 lun 0
da1: <WDC WD10 EADS-11M2B2 > Fixed Direct Access SCSI-2 device 
da1: 40.000MB/s transfers
da1: 953869MB (244190646 4096 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 15200C)
GEOM_PART: integrity check failed (da1, MBR)
```

and as GEOM reports the partition table was not readable and the disk was not mountable. After having fixed the power issue with the original bay, this is what happens using the WD bay:


```
da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus4 target 0 lun 0
da0: <WD Ext HDD 1021 2002> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-4 device 
da0: 40.000MB/s transfers
da0: 953867MB (1953519616 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 121600C)
```

(the fact that in the former case the disk is reported as /dev/da1 is because the external peripheral was a two disk bay, while the original one was a single bay).

So as of this writing the disk is working again, but I'm curious to understand this strange behavior, that I think is not strictly related to FreeBSD. Sounds to me like the hardware controller is faking the partition table or similar.


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## SirDice (May 23, 2012)

I think the two bay enclosure also has RAID functionality, this might be the culprit. Its controller might expect some RAID-related housekeeping on the disk somewhere. When it failed to find it, it failed to recognize the disk as "initialized".


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## fluca1978 (May 24, 2012)

SirDice said:
			
		

> I think the two bay enclosure also has RAID functionality, this might be the culprit. Its controller might expect some RAID-related housekeeping on the disk somewhere. When it failed to find it, it failed to recognize the disk as "initialized".



Uhm..I don't think so, since the two-bay enclosure has one IDE bay and one SATA bay (my disk is SATA), and is not marked as a raid bay anywhere. However I'm making copies of my data as it is working, and then I will try another external bay and report some results. It could be that the 2-bay enclosure I used was faulty too.


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## fluca1978 (Oct 23, 2012)

I pick up this old thread just to inform that I had the chance to do other tests, and I can confirm that the partition table is unreadable if the disk is placed into any other external bay. Being formatted NTFS I also tried to mount it in Linux and Windows (when you are desperate...) but every system reports that the partition table is missing and that the disk has to be reinitialized.


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