My Book Essential - No writable partition on Surface Pro 3

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

Hi, I have a strange issue with my external WD HDD - My Book Essential 2TB. It is working fine on my PC without any problems. Few days ago I have bought a new Microsoft Surface Pro 3 (Windows 8.1 x64) and I am not able to access data on my HDD from it. When I connect it, system is recognizing the USB device properly, my HDD is properly recognized and it appears in the “Devices and Printers” list, but not in My Computer.

I have tried to update the drivers, but it did not help. I have installed the latest WD Smart Ware app and there I see the follwoing error: “No writable partition found”. Anyone knows what is going on? As I said this HDD is working perfectly with my PC all the time. The Surface USB port is also fine, because I can connect there other USB devices and they works without problems. Thank you for help.

Edit: from my PC I have ran the quick tests - no issues.

2

Welcome to the Community.

Did you look for clues under Disk Management as opposed to Device Manager? It is possible for the hard drive to need a drive letter.

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1284/

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/137/

3

Hi! Thank you for your replay. I went to the “Disk Management” and I have simply assigned the driver letter. Now it is working… But I have no idea why it was not done automatically?

4

It’s possible the device had a signature conflict and Windows decided to drop the drive letter.