For those of you reading this, take what I tell you with adequate caution. You know what you can do. Me? I play and learn. Sometimes I get myself in real trouble. Digging myself out of a hole is a learning situation for me. You may wish to avoid troubles that could possibly cause you to have to entirely reformat your drive, lose your data, and reinstall Windows. That said, here we go.
Actually, this shouldn’t present any ways for the novice to cause harm to him/herself or others …
Maybe there’s a device driver that didn’t install properly?
You could look in Windows Device Manager and see if there is any device with some icon beside it that might indicate a problem. A yellow triangle with an exclamation mark in the middle has always been a big clue in past versions of Windows. You have to choose to view hidden devices in order to see the WesternDigital SCSI Enclosure Device driver. (That’s the SES thing that Windows installs for these WD Passport drives.)
1 Hold down Windows Logo key on the keyboard and then press and release the x key
2 Choose “Device Manager” from the menu that pops up
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Click “yes” to the User Account Control warning window if it pops up
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Choose “view” at the top of the window
5 Choose “show hidden devices”
Now, if everything is good, then you will see that all of the “nodes” are collapsed. In other words, there should be no parts of the tree that are expanded to show the component parts of that section.
But, are you seeing anything expanded with some sort of wierd icon beside it?
If nothing has a wierd icon, then look near the bottom. Do you see the node titled: “WD Drive Management Devices” ? That should be there.
Click on the arrow to expand it. If your drive is not connected, the sub entry titled “WD SES Device” should be greyed out (greyed out means the type font and its little icon will be rather faint).
Okay so far?
Now plug in your WD drive. Leave the Device Manager window open.
It should flash two or three times before your eyes as the newly attached device is identified and enumerated into the list.
Now, you may need to go back to the node titled “WD Drive Management Devices” and click on that node to expand it again. At this point the sub-entry “WD SES Device” should still be there but it won’t be greyed out. It will show up in the same dark text font as everyting else that’s good in the list.
By the way, don’t be concerned at this time by other things in the lists that are “greyed out.” Just leave them as they are. These should simply be things that are installed but not currently connected.
