I bought a 2nd-hand WD “My Passport Ultra” magnetic hard drive, so I don’t know the history. Attached it and it spins but it makes an unexpected sound. It’s likely toast but I still like to get to the bottom of things for academic masterbation. I wanted the SMART logs to tell me it’s dead.

The rumor is that USB→SATA interfaces can mask out SMART commands and interefere with diagnostics. To really talk to a drive faithfully it must be attached directly to a normal SATA bus with no bridging trickery. So I opened up the enclosure and found that there is no SATA to speak of. The controller board for the drive is USB 3.

When the drive is attached, lsblk shows no new /dev/sd[abc] handle. So there is no way to even try to run smartctl. I know a drive can be so hosed that the kernel does not even give a handle but that’s rare in my experience. I wonder if the fact that USB is baked into the circuit board in some way reduces versatility/capability and increases the fragility. The controller board looks fine. It’s hard to believe that the controller is damaged. The dmesg output shows this:

dmesg output 
[ 4378.713396] ses 4:0:0:1: Attached Enclosure device
[ 5204.301677] usb 2-1.3: new high-speed USB device number 6 using ehci-pci
[ 5204.849675] usb 2-1.3: device descriptor read/64, error -71
[ 5205.067013] usb 2-1.3: New USB device found, idVendor=1058, idProduct=0810, bcdDevice=10.49
[ 5205.067021] usb 2-1.3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 5205.067025] usb 2-1.3: Product: My Passport 0810
[ 5205.067027] usb 2-1.3: Manufacturer: Western Digital
[ 5205.067029] usb 2-1.3: SerialNumber: ...
[ 5205.067462] usb-storage 2-1.3:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[ 5205.067869] scsi host4: usb-storage 2-1.3:1.0
[ 5206.079121] scsi 4:0:0:0: Direct-Access     WD       My Passport 0810 1049 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[ 5206.079957] scsi 4:0:0:1: Enclosure         WD       SES Device       1049 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[ 5206.083644] sd 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[ 5206.083720] ses 4:0:0:1: Attached Enclosure device
[ 5206.083791] ses 4:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 13
[ 5206.087259] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Spinning up disk...
[ 5207.101684] .
[ 5227.423666] ses 4:0:0:1: Failed to get diagnostic page 0x1
[ 5227.423679] ses 4:0:0:1: Failed to bind enclosure -19
[ 5228.445659] ...............................ready
[ 5439.175609] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 timing out command, waited 180s
[ 5619.179805] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 timing out command, waited 180s
[ 5799.191493] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 timing out command, waited 180s
[ 5799.191528] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Read Capacity(10) failed: Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
[ 5799.191536] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense Key : Hardware Error [current] 
[ 5799.191541] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] ASC=0x30 <<vendor>>ASCQ=0x8d 
[ 5799.191546] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] 0 512-byte logical blocks: (0 B/0 B)
[ 5799.191549] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] 0-byte physical blocks

Tried 2 different cables so it’s not the cable. AFAIK, the only thing left to do is pull out the magnet for fishing or whatever and toss the rest.

Or is there perhaps a chance that a toolkit like “Ultimate Boot CD” might have a tool that can low-level format this thing? Consider those tools tend to be DOS tools I wonder if USB is even viable.