Passport drive not showing in MS explorer

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
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job - transfering files from toshiba mini winXP  to HP dv7 notebook win7.

setup:  files were transferred from  toshiba to 1T passport.  File structure shows, everything normal.

–  passport plugged into HP.  drive pnp seemed to work momentarily (light blinked a couple of times)

– HP dv7:  passport does not show on HP explorer. and files cannot be accessed.

– device manager showed drivers installed and enabled.

– disk manager shows passport (as ‘drive 2’ primary) online and normal. 

What I’ve tried:

  1. updated drivers both from online downloads and from internal files – neither worked.

  2. uninstalled and reinstalled drivers.  didn’t work.

3.  tried to change drive letter  in disk manager. repeated messages that “disk manager needed to be refreshed”.  did that, both by refresh/rescans; then by restart. then by hard reboot. nothing worked.

  1. changed drive letter using toshiba. then retried above steps on HP.  didn’t work.
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Try to recover your files with a data recovery program like recuva or testdisk, after that you can try to format it from the disk management window. 

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Thanks Aluc…  yes, that seemed to be the only alternative. Didn’t have to rescue the data - passport was fine. Just hooked it to another machine,  offloaded the data and then reformatted the drive.    (I recall there was an issue like this concerning win7 preserving disk identities back in 2008 or '09.  Thought they had fixed that though.  Wish WD & MS would put there heads together and come up with a patch to prevent that from happening. Guy I know with a repair shop said he gets that problem fairly often. Any way, thanks for taking the time.

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ps: didn’t see an ‘option’ in the pulldown for “solved” – but I consider the problem as solved.