About six months ago, I bought a WD My Passport 2TB Portable External USB 3.0 Hard Drive. It worked fine until a couple days ago, when it just suddenly stopped working, with no warning whatsoever. The power light is on, but the drive does not appear on Disk Management or when I type the drive letter at the command prompt. I get the same results after rebooting and when trying the drive on multiple computers. I do have some data on it that I’d like to recover. Any suggestions,aside from taking it to a professional data recovery company, or am I completely out of luck?
Hello,
I recommend that you try a different USB cable and also some basic troubleshooting:
1- Disconnect the drive from the computer and restart the computer.
2- If the computer is a desktop, connect it on the back USB port (directly to the PC, not through a hub).
3- Make sure you hear the connection sound windows makes when recognizes a USB device.
4- Go to "Disk Management” to verify if the drive shows up there.
If the drive shows up in disk management but it is not seen on Computer, then it means the partition is corrupted and you will have to format it in order to use it again. Please note that formatting the drive will delete all data stored on it.
Thanks for the suggestions, but I tried all of those things already. I also tried connecting the drive to a laptop as well, with no success. The drive does not show up in "Disk Management on either the desktop or laptop, though it is getting power, as the light on the drives does come on when plugged in. Any other ideas?
Thanks in advance.
Is there anything that can be done to recover the data if My Passport shows up on Devices under the Control Panel but not My Computer? It says my device is working properly, but I am unable to open the files.
Just bumping this thread. Any ideas on how I can get the drive to show up in Disk Management? If I can at least get that far, I can troubleshoot, but until then, it’s just a paperweight.
i have same problem to, my passport appears on device manager and controp panel’s drivers… it says my device is working properly, but it doesnt appear on my computer… how will we fix these? i also want to recover my files
Respectfully, you do not have the same problem. If your drive is showing up in Device Manager, you can run a chkdsk on it.
I just discovered this problem this morning as well. My Passport was working fine until it wasn’t being recognized by my macbook, and it’s not showing up in disk utility or anywhere else either. I hope there’s a solution for this! >.<
Hi I know how to prevent it at least most of the time. USE the safely Remove hardware function when you unplug the drive from the PC. If you have not been doing this it can cause the partition table to be destroyed and then you can no longer access the drive. If you can not get the PC to recognize the drive your only choice is to use a data recovery company or RMA the drive. Sorry but those are the only choices I hope you all can get your data back.
Hi Hammey. Thanks for the response. Yeah, I was afraid that might be the case. I think a data recovery company is my only hope. So sad that a Western Digital drive failed so spectacularly after only six months, especially considering I almost never moved it and always treated it with care. I guess this will be my last WD drive. 
