Recently, I accidentally unplugged my 1 TB Passport SE during a file transfer. It hasn’t been quite the same since. I was able to pull the files I needed from it (although the transfer was very, very slow) and it worked a bit for a few days, however the performance was clearly going downhill (maybe I have a virus?). The data appears to be gone, so I’d like to just reformat the drive and start over. There’s no clicking sound and I can feel the disk spinning. The light blinks a few times when I first plug it in, but then seems to turn off and never come back on.
When I plug it in, Windows (Windows 7) tells me that it cannot access the drive unless I format it. However, Windows is “unable to complete the format”. I then tried to format it from the command prompt by typing “format g:” (g: being the drive), but I get the following error: “The media being formatted has been removed or has become invalid”.
I tried to use the Western Digital Quick Formatter, but it just seems to crash with this output:
Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: WD Quick Formatter.exe
Application Version: 1.2.0.10
Application Timestamp: 4e84b045
Fault Module Name: KERNELBASE.dll
Fault Module Version: 6.1.7601.17651
Fault Module Timestamp: 4e211319
Exception Code: e06d7363
Exception Offset: 0000b9bc
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.768.3
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: acb9
Additional Information 2: acb9d3815f4c204a197311dc96813a7d
Additional Information 3: e13c
Additional Information 4: e13cf6b842e41cf724deb85165061a65
I then used Windows’ Disk Management program and the hard drive appears at 931 GB RAW. Trying to format it here also does not work. When I try to delete the data I get “The system cannot find the file specified”.
Next, I tried to just delete everything using Eraser 6.0.9 but I get the following error: “Attempted to Access a Path That is Not on the Disk”. I then tried to use Killdisk, but it seems to just sit there with no progress being made.
Finally, I tried to analyze the disk with TestDisk but get the following: “Partition Read Error”. In fact, I wasn’t able to do much and seemed to mostly just get a bunch of read errors when I tried to analyze it.
The disk appears in Windows Explorer but when I click “properties” it shows up as 0 bytes in size. When I try to save data to it now I get “g: is not accessible. The parameter is incorrect.”
I’ve also tried uninstalling and reinstalling the driver but nothing seems to happen. The disk shows up in Device Manager and I uninstalled it and it seemed to reinstall ok after I restarted the computer.
At one point I got an error that said something along the lines of “The partition has collapsed” and also something about all NTFS boot sectors being unwritable, however I can’t exactly remember what I tried when I saw those errors.
Anyone have any ideas on how I can get this thing going again? I’m not too concerned with saving any data - I really just want to be able to use it. Any help will be very much appreciated. I really don’t want to just throw $100+ dollars in the garbage, especially since I just bought the thing like a week ago…
