My Passport Slim Not Recognized--it was the cable!

A friend called me yesterday to help with her just-purchased My Passport Slim 1.0TB for her old Windows Vista machine.  She had plugged it in, but it wasn’t being recognized, sort of.

When I came over, I repeated many of the steps she had already gone through.  Wanting to use a third-party backup software, she had not installed the WD software, but had installed the SES driver.  Still not recognized.

I could easily see the drive in Device Manager, which said that it was working properly, but neither My Computer, Windows Explorer, nor Disk Management could see it.  We uninstalled and re-installed SES driver.  All sorts of fiddling, Googling and looking at others with similar problems, all with no results.

Because the cord that came with the Passport was pretty short, she had plugged that cord into a USB extension cable, about three feet or so long, that plugged into her computer and had a female A plug on her desk.  That extension cable worked fine with her two flash drives.

In desperation, we tried plugging the Passport directly into the computer instead of using the extension cable.  The drive immediately showed up in Windows Explorer and My Computer.  Everything was ok.

I’m a little puzzled about why there was a problem with the extension cable.  The computer presumably had USB 2.0, but was made a time the nobody had ever heard of USB 3.0, and besides, USB 3.0 is famously backward-compatible. If the plug on the back of the computer presented a vanilla USB 2.0 interface to the world, then presumably the extension should present exactly the same.  Maybe it was the additional length?

Anyway, I thought that I should post an account of our adventure in case someone else has the same problem.

It’s probaly a voltage issue. A lot of computers come with barely adequer power supplies. Using a longer cable or hub can drop the voltage enough to cause problems. WD recommends not to use a cable longer than supplied or a hub.

Joe

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I guess–who knew that just a couple of feet of cable could cause such a significant voltage drop?  I guess that it the problem originated with the older computer, which wasn’t created in the days when there were many devices drawing power from the USB ports.

I’ve taken a bried look through the Passport Slim User Manual, plus some Knowledge Base, FAQ, and Troubleshooting notes, and didn’t come across a mention of the length of USB cables, so I thought that it might be useful to mention this in the Community.  Cheers, --Howard

I suggest a 50 HDD RETURN. I’m running into a problem too with Their Cable Jack on the back of the My Passport Slim. I want to use this drive as a Directv DVR Extension Drive. Since Directv has a USB & a ESATA jacks on the back on Their DVR, some Rocket Scientist at Directv used the ESATA Port INSTEAD of the VASTLY MORE COMMON USB 2.0 Jack. W/O Opening the HDD Box, I ordered a  ESATA TO A USB 2.0 or 3.0 Cable. Cable came, I opened the HDD Box, only to find some other OBSCURE, RARE Plug I only had seen on a FRENCH Brand, a LaCie Rikki HDD Previous to today. I tried calling up W/D to find out **bleep** this jack even is called, but was unable to read the 000.5 Font Serial Number, but w/o the S# the [Deleted] WOULDN’T ANSWER THE (I’M SURE) COMMON QUESTION. Now I’m really PISSED. The Box said the HDD Fits a USB 2.0 & 3.0, but this jack is some other obscure jack that I’ve only seen on a FRENCH Company’s HDD. **bleep**, didn’t W/D want to pay licensing fees for a vastly more common USB 3.0 & 2.0 Jack???

SRCASTK wrote:

I suggest a 50 HDD RETURN. I’m running into a problem too with Their Cable Jack on the back of the My Passport Slim. I want to use this drive as a Directv DVR Extension Drive. Since Directv has a USB & a ESATA jacks on the back on Their DVR, some Rocket Scientist at Directv used the ESATA Port INSTEAD of the VASTLY MORE COMMON USB 2.0 Jack. W/O Opening the HDD Box, I ordered a  ESATA TO A USB 2.0 or 3.0 Cable. Cable came, I opened the HDD Box, only to find some other OBSCURE, RARE Plug I only had seen on a FRENCH Brand, a LaCie Rikki HDD Previous to today. I tried calling up W/D to find out **bleep** this jack even is called, but was unable to read the 000.5 Font Serial Number, but w/o the S# the [Deleted] WOULDN’T ANSWER THE (I’M SURE) COMMON QUESTION. Now I’m really PISSED. The Box said the HDD Fits a USB 2.0 & 3.0, but this jack is some other obscure jack that I’ve only seen on a FRENCH Company’s HDD. **bleep**, didn’t W/D want to pay licensing fees for a vastly more common USB 3.0 & 2.0 Jack???

Welcome to the Community.

It is called “Micro USB 3.0”. the current standard USB 3.0 connector:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#Cable_plugs_.28USB_3.0.29

The port/connector itself in the hard drive is backwards-compatible with standard Micro USB 2.0 cables by only using the flat connector, ignoring the USB 3.0 extension. Notice the shape:

usb2-micro-b.jpg