Terrible tragedy. While performing a backup, I knocked my My Passport off the table, the USB became disconnected, it hit the floor. When I plugged it back in, was recognized as a device in the device manager (correctly identified as WD My Passport 0820 USB Device), but I don’t see a drive letter, and if I go to Disk Management I couldn’t see any partitions, but I can see the disk. So my questions are:
1)is there any chance that I can recover the partitions on this disk, without going through full blown data recovery services? It has backups of data that is all currently on my hard drive, so a laborious recovery process probably doesn’t make sense.
2)If not, what’s the recommended way to re-initialize/re-format the disk? I have found the article for low-level format (How to Fully Erase, Low Level Format, or Write Zeros on a Drive), is this it and which of the methods on this page I should use? Or should I use Disk Management instead?
2a)If I reformat the disk, what’s the recommended way to check it for physical damage so I know if it’s going to be reliable?
THANKS very much!
