03/10/2026
Clicking WD My Book not showing up? Behind the scenes in our data recovery lab, one click was hiding two separate faults.
This is a real case we worked on. A WD My Book external drive, sent to us from South Australia, started clicking nonstop and the computer could not see it. It held 20 years of family photos, home videos and dog obedience club records.
How our data recovery engineer approached it:
1. Opened the drive in a laminar flow cabinet in our Sydney data recovery lab and found head 0 completely ripped off.
2. Fitted matched donor heads. The drive still clicked, but with a different click, which pointed to a second, unrelated fault on the circuit board.
3. Moved the original ROM chip onto a board from the same donor drive. The drive powered up cleanly and a full image was taken.
100 percent of the data came back: 440GB, including over 12,000 photos, 5,000 videos and more than 130,000 files, all in good condition.
A tip from the video: on a WD My Book the encryption sits in the USB to SATA bridge board inside the enclosure, so don't take the drive out of its case.
If you have a WD My Book like this, or know someone who does, email [email protected] or call 1300 444 800.
Based in Australia, international customers welcome!