I have a WD My Passport External drive that I used when I transferred to my new PC last year. I’ve used it on and off regularly for backing up but also left some less important files on it after the move. Now its showing signs that its dying, I’m getting error 0x800701b1 when ever I try to back up files from it to another drive. Any chance of getting these files off or is it cooked?
*edit, performed a restart and my main storage drive never came back… maybe the external drive was never the issue? This main storage drive has given me trouble since day one in one way or another.
Storytime:
A couple years ago I updated my 2 PC’s, rotating hardware around while introducing new parts.
My plan to make a backup image of all hard drives to a NAS in advance did not work out. One drive in the oldest PC would always stop at around 60% of copy progress. I tried a dozen times.
At some point I realized the drive is fine. It was a faulty RAM stick that only got used when several GB of data got cached. After removing it, all backups went through and the system ran another 5 years until getting retired just a few weeks ago.
Morale of the story: Sometimes it looks like hard drive failure, bit it’s actually another component that’s broken.
Run some basic diagnostics. Include a proper memory test.
