HELP
I purchased a “WD My passport” 64gb a few months ago planning to save about 500-600 images of very old pictures that I gradually scanned to create a new family project.
Everything was going well saving all the images as I kept adding(almost done). Today when I connected the passport to my PC, I noticed it doesn’t recognize it! I kept googling to find out what could be the issue.
I tried it on another laptop and went out and also bought a new USB cable and still is not working!
When I go to the device manager, the passport is there and it says “device is working properly”, however; I can’t access my data!! I also downloaded the update on WD.com
In some attempts, it’s asking me to either reformat or initialize the device which I am absolutely scared to do. I don’t want to lose all that work.
I also tried to change WD drive letter but “WD” nowhere to be found on that list on the disk management page!
When I go to the Control panel, devices & printers page, My passport is there too!
I am really desperate. PLEASE HELP…
I have a very similar issue, and unfortunately it has happened to me sever times since I bought the hard drive.
None of the partition recovery tools have ever been able to find my lost partitions. I think your best bet is to use the app called GetDataBack. To me it was able to find all files on the drive within a minute.
You can then simply copy the files to a different drive, and reformat your WD passport drive.
This happened to me always when I returned from sleep mode. But not every time…
Hi Ati,
Thank you so much for getting back to me. This is so frustrating, isn’t it? I am not a tech person and this is the first time that I decided to purchase EHD because of this family project I am working on. I had no idea I had to copy everything in two separate drives! I guess we live and learn!
Do you think that this brand might be the issue? So should I buy a 2nd external hard drive from another brand to transfer the data or it doesn’t matter?
Otherwise, the whole point of getting an external hard drive is to keep our records safe which doesn’t look like it does:)
Would you please send me the link for downloading GETDADABACK? There are so many out there that I am afraid to click on the wrong one and get myself into another chaos:)
I really appreciate your help.
Best
Audrey
Sorry Ati to bother you again. I did find their website and downloaded the app.
Please see the attached print screen of what I get when I attempt to recover.
Does this mean that my external hard drive is not readable even with this app?
I am desperate. Please help!
Hi Audrey,
That’s a different program, what I meant was this one. Data Recovery Software — Downloads
The problem is that it’s expensive. It can be easily downloaded for free from a different source, but the forum rules prohibits me to post a link to that, and I cannot seem to be able send personal message 
There is a website called fcportables dot com. You can search for getdataback on that site. Download and extract a rar file, then you can simply start the program from the folder. If your PC doesn’t recognize the rar file, you need to install a program called winrar WinRAR archiver, a powerful tool to process RAR and ZIP files It’s free.
I don’t think it’s a brand issue, WD is one of the most trusted brands. What I have learned in the past few decades is that anything can go wrong at any time in a computer. So it’s best to store important files on at least two different hard drives. I have lost probably over a thousand photos and part of my music collection over the years, because of faulty drives and accidental deletions.
Goog luck!
PS: I forgot to mention that it may be possible that you can recover the entire partition. But I don’t know any free software that can do that. But if you are able to recover just your files, then you can create a new partition in disk manager and reformat the drive.
