About a month ago my laptop started intermittently recognising My Passport; then two weeks ago it stopped recognising it at all. When I put the USB lead in there is the normal ‘beep’ but then nothing. I took it to a small but unhelpful computer shop who tried it in their PC with the same result; then the chap virtually shrugged his shoulders and said there was nothing he could do; and I should have backed up my data on TWO external hard drives. As I have 10 years of digital photography stored here and many GB of music is it still possible to access/transfer the data? HELP!
I have the same problem, and I have 900G of data in it, Can someone help me out on this!! :cry:
Welcome to the WD Community guys.
Have you guys tried to use a data recovery software?
Do a quick search online and you will find multiple options that might help.
Hmmmm… correct me if I am wrong but…
Doesn;t data recovery software actually require the computer to actually recognise the device to actually be able to recover the data?
This is exactly what happened to my hard drive - it kept on coming up “USB device not recognised” - it required a data recovery expert to recover my data.
If you know of a way to recover data when the computer does not recognise the device please do give details.
Yes, same -[despite minimal use of the HDD & treating it as if it were fragile china - I could understand if I’d been clumsy with it, but to say it’s meant to be a portable, & pricey, back-up - NOT happy]- Finally found a free recovery tool that worked [others didn’t] - PhotoRec - CGSecurity 
