MY BOOK ESSENTIAL - No longer recognised?

Portable Drives My Passport
1

MY BOOK ESSENTIAL has been working fine but for no apparant reason suddenly does not allow access.

The PC (Windows XP) recognises the disc and allows WD Smartware to unlock it after which only the main WD Smartware (F) drive can be accessed. The local Disk (G) which is subdirectory cannot be opened. Clicking on ‘properties’ for G advises ‘disk is not formatted. The destination drive G is not formatted. Do you want to format it now. Yes / No’ Meanwhile the main WD Smartware directory confirms 644MB of used space with 0 freespace.

On the lights, the padlock is fully lit and the small light blinks.

Any ideas on how I can get back to the data which I know is on the F drive??

2

Hi, you can try to recover your data with recuva or testdisk.

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

3

Thanks for that Al.

It does work, but because there is 600GB+ of photos and NEF files on board it is going to take several weeks for the sftware to recover the files - most of which I have already deleted.

There must be another way of unlocking the drive and resetting the register without formatting?

Cheers,

Mike