I am not one to remain within the confines of what I’m told to do, especially when it comes to computers. I bought a WD Passport 1TB USB 3.0, and the very first thing I did was format the drive, and partition it into 750 GB NTFS (labeled Passport), and 250 GB FAT32 (labeled TXFR). I have a PS3, so that’s what I use the FAT32 for, and I have files larger than 4 GB, and I can’t use the FAT32 for that. I also re-formatted it because I love the hard drives that WD makes, not the software. The software is memory-hogging, does not perform the simple operations smoothly or nicely, and is generally not user-friendly. I know what I need to back up, and if I can’t keep track of it, then how would I remember to restore it if needed?
It worked out perfectly in theory, and for a few days. I don’t actually have any USB 3 ports on my computer at the moment, but it says 2.0 compatible, so I went right ahead. I’ve already stored some stuff on the Passport side.
Through careless use of the USB plug, not realizing I wasn’t actually pushing it in all the way, it started not finishing file transfers properly. I got slightly more and more frustrated, until in desperate attempts to make the computer see the drive, I might have unplugged it a few times without safely removing. Now, whenever I plug it in, my diagnostics tell me that it still has the hardware model ‘WD My Passport 0748’, but capacity is 0 and it’s not formatted. I’m not looking for it to get serviced under the warranty or anything, but is it still salvageable? Can Best Buy do it or something?
Maybe important, but I run Ubuntu Linux and Windows 7. And before you start telling me about ‘compatible with PC’ and ‘not compatible with Linux’ or anything, phrases like that are for people who don’t know computers. It’s a drive that holds stuff. It has a master boot record. A computer system can read it. Finito.
