I have a My Passport 0748 which stopped working near the beginning of February 2016. This drive had been working fine when connected to my Windows 7 laptop.
Since then, whenever I plug the drive into the laptop, it isn’t recognised until a quite few minutes afterwards, and then it shows up as having 0 GB storage, and eventually a dialogue box appears telling me I need to format the disk before using it and asking if I want to format the disk - to which I answered “No”.
I tried updating the firmware, and the WD firmware updater told me it was successful on the second attempt. However; the driver update failed (it was taking an inordinately long time, and must’ve timed out).
I have used EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard to find files (about 260 GB worth), but all of the recovered files I have looked at so far are damaged and unusable.
Just before the drive failed, it was plugged into a Windows 10 laptop, and worked OK. After it failed, I plugged it into an old XP laptop which couldn’t recognise it either.
Is there anything further I can try, or is this HDD ready for the e-waste bin? The drive was used as a backup, but some some of the material on it didn’t make it onto other machines / drives used for backup, so I’d like to recover some of the more recent files.
PS: this drive failed on or shortly after the date on which FTDI released a driver published to Windows Update which resulted in some USB products being left inoperable. I’m not saying this is definitely the cause in this case, but I know of someone with a WD My Passport which was not recognised by a Windows 10 machine after the obligatory involuntary update, and plugging it into a USB 2 port apparently solved the problem.
