Why is my WD Passport not recognised by any computer any more?

Anonymous January 26, 2014
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Suddenly, my WD Passport isn’t reconized by any computer in Explorer or in Device Manager. HELP!!!!!!

My 1TB external drive has stopped being recognized altogether, and I think I might die as a result! I have been up and down the forums and tried several things. Uninstalling and re-installing drivers, running various programs aimed at fixing a similar issue, all with no luck. It won’t show up in Device manager and the one time it did it had a yellow “caution” or whatever in front of it so I uninstalled the driver, re-booted, still no luck. My roomate tried the drive on his laptop and desktop with no luck. He also tried a different cable – still no luck.

The light comes on, I can feel the drive spin but nothing. I feel like lately it has been randomly uninstalling and re-intalling itself and now I’m just waiting for it to work long enough to pull my data off of it. That’s all I really need.

  1. Gerry
    February 4, 2014 at 7:31 am

    I had a WD larger passport die. It was only 500G but still, the items on it were important (even if I couldn't remember what they were)

    I took the case apart (it was five+ years old) and found that a surface mounted chip had come off. The hard drive no longer worked in a different case.

    You have a few options:

    1. Try the hard drive on a different port on your computer. Do NOT use it on a port which is through your keyboard as these do not always have enough power.

    2. Try the hard drive on a different computer. Sometimes apple will say "fail" and a PC will at least give some feedback.

    3. With the hard drive plugged in, check in device manager or the "about this Mac" diagnostic and see if the computer can at least see the controller for the hard drive. If the hard drive is toast, you may still see the controller, but it won't recognize the drive capacity.

    4. Contact western digital, it may be on warranty, or they may have their own diagnostic software you can check.

    WD products do have a comprehensive warranty, there may be things you can do there.

    What I suggest you NOT do is remove the hard drive and try it in another controller. That WILL void your warranty. You should buy a new hard drive, just in case yours is suddenly visible, so you can salvage some things from it.

  2. brian
    January 26, 2014 at 3:28 pm

    Thanks but unfortunatly the drive doesn't show up anywhere.

    • dragonmouth
      January 27, 2014 at 2:06 pm

      Have you tried using a different cable between the drive and the PC? If the cableis bad, no software will help.

  3. dragonmouth
    January 26, 2014 at 2:34 pm

    The first thing you should do is use different cable to connect your Passport to a PC. If the cable is bad or the conncetions are bad, no testing or recovery software will help you.

  4. Hovsep A
    January 26, 2014 at 12:48 pm