For some time my WD My Passport Wireless Pro (a hard drive with some extra wireless and battery functionality) is not recognized as hard drive with file system. I get the message “Western Digital My Passport Wireless has been connected.”, but it is not showing up in the file manager.
I checked dmesg and it says the following after plugging the drive in:
[14712.281889] usb 3-6: new high-speed USB device number 19 using xhci_hcd
[14712.414491] usb 3-6: New USB device found, idVendor=1058, idProduct=25af, bcdDevice=10.04
[14712.414501] usb 3-6: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=1
[14712.414504] usb 3-6: Product: My Passport Wireless
[14712.414506] usb 3-6: Manufacturer: Western Digital
[14712.414508] usb 3-6: SerialNumber: 575837314536364346303337
[14712.415997] usb-storage 3-6:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[14712.416770] scsi host0: usb-storage 3-6:1.0
[14713.426974] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access WD My Passport 25AF 1004 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[14713.428490] scsi 0:0:0:1: Enclosure WD SES Device 1004 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[14713.437745] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Spinning up disk...
[14714.438503] ............ready
[14757.161655] usb 3-6: reset high-speed USB device number 19 using xhci_hcd
[14762.421531] usb 3-6: device descriptor read/64, error -110
[14777.994971] usb 3-6: device descriptor read/64, error -110
Sometimes this also occurs:
[294244.142553] ses 0:0:0:1: Wrong diagnostic page; asked for 1 got 8
[294244.142557] ses 0:0:0:1: Failed to get diagnostic page 0x1
[294244.142561] ses 0:0:0:1: Failed to bind enclosure -19
When the device is connected, you can hear a faint ticking sound, so I’m afraid it might be a hardware fault causing the hard drive to be read incorrectly. But maybe I am wrong and someone has an idea of how to solve this problem?
If you hear a clic-clic-clic-clic sound while powering on the disk or a clic each 3-4 seconds once started, be sure you have a backup. WD drives are known for this (you can search “wd click of death”…).
Unfortunately this does seem to indicate that the drive is toast and is unable to read track 0. I’m sure most of us have experienced this at some point, myself included.
I’m not up with more modern WD drives but back in the day when this would happen there were a couple of tricks that could potentially get the drive up and working so you could copy data off of it before replacing it.
One was to put the drive on a flat surface, unpowered, and spin it, presumably the centrifugal force applied unstuck the read head or some mechanical component and allowed it to work next power on. Note this can also crash the read head into the disk in some cases and cause other damage but as a last resort can be helpful.
The other was to put the disk in a ziplock bag with the air sucked out, and put it all in the freezer for a few hours.
Interestingly enough, I never encountered these problems with other brands of disk.
Linux detects the device on the USB2/high speed bus.
Linux has identified exactly what the device is.
Linux attaches the USB mass-storage driver.
The drive responds to the SCSI commands and Linux identifis both disk and enclosure.
Linux allows the disk to spin up, and the drive tells linux it is ready.
The USB controller decides it needs to reset the device without saying why.
5 seconds later it errors with -110. Negative errors are almost always the kernel, and -110 is ETIMEDOUT (Connection timed out)
Despite the drive ticking I wouldn’t settle on a hardware failure just yet. Make sure the device is appropriately powered if possible - not just USB powered. Also make sure its not running piggy backed off something else. Plug it directly into a USB port on the PC; and if it already is, try another USB port - particularly one on another controller if you have one. Also try another USB cable.
As a bonus: you can cross match the error number in the kernel headers with the following:
grep -R 'ETIMEDOUT.*110' /usr/include
Which will give you: /usr/include/asm-generic/errno.h:#define ETIMEDOUT 110 /* Connection timed out */
Just to be on the safe side, you haven’t installed USBGuard or similar software, have you? I had a similar problem until I realised that USBGuard was blocking the USB drive.
I never paid much attention to this… until it happened to me. An external hard drive wouldn’t work connected to the front USB ports, but works when connected to the rear USB ports. It seems the front ports have a small voltage drop due to the piece of cable from the motherboard to the front connector. I finally replaced the single-connector USB cable with one of these, and the problems were definitely solved.
