I’ve had this Passport for about 3 years but only now getting to grips with it, following purchase of new computer. All seems well until perhaps once a week the computer, a Packard Bell, is unable to recognise the Passport. All the connections are sound. Any suggestions, please? Is the Passport missing some downloads - is there some means of checking? My knowledge of computers is barely basic … all I want the Passport to do is to make ongoing saves of current documents, not multiple copies in various stages of development.
Hello,
If you access your computer disk management are you able to see your drive? is the drive allocated? Also have you test your drive with a different computer? Are you encountering the same behavior.
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Awopero - many thanks for your advice. When I switch on the computer sometimes the Passport appears as the 3rd hard drive (this computer has two hard drives internally) and sometimes it doesn’t. The white flag in the bottom tray says there is 1 computer issue, to check my backup settings. There will be a message: ‘The last scheduled backup did not run’ … ‘Windows cannot find the disk where your backups are being saved’ … and then … ‘Windows Backup has detected that this disk [the Passport] may be corrupted - check disk for errors’.
Thinking over your advice, I notice that the computer is set to run a backup each day at 1900hrs. It occurs to me that quite often the computer isn’t switched on at 1900, and possibly this is part of the problem when I switch on the following day - the computer is aware that a deadline has been missed. I’ve run a Check Disk (and an entire Defrag) on the Passport and no problems or corruption emerged. I did get a box appearing yesterday offering to ‘Run / Install Program’ so I ticked this (having highlighted the Passport) and also ‘Always do this’.
Since then, when I switch on the computer, after a couple of minutes the Passport appears as the 3rd hard drive. Also, I’ve been able to open the Passport and confirm that Word docs, for example, are being saved there. As far as the white flag is concerned, I’ve switched off the notification that ‘the scheduled backup did not run’ because I can never predict at what time of day I’ll be using the computer, and I’m relying on the Passport to make ongoing saves of all docs, etc.
On a slightly different aspect, the Passport shows 39% used already, but until very recently I was allowing it to save 5 versions of each document, etc, whereas in fact I require only the current version. As a consequence, the Passport is harbouring superseded versions of work and I assume I can just go into the Passport and delete these superfluous copies in order to release storage space.
It seems to me that the computer and the Passport are now working together, and I’m much happier and more confident now than I was a week ago. Once again, many thanks for your advice, and I apologise for my IT ignorance.
I’ll suggest you to backup your data and write zeroes to the drive using the DLG tool.
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Awopero -
I’m sorry for my lack of knowledge. I’ve been searching on the WD website for ‘DLG’ software but all I’ve come across is a piece of hardware that looks like a hard drive - where can I find the appropriate software to download, please, in order to delete old and / or duplicated material from the Passport?
On the Passport home screen it says that my computer system files total 57.8GB, whereas the ‘Additional Files’ stored by the Passport now stand at 211.1GB; also, my computer’s hard disk has only 83GB total in use, but the Passport shows 228GB in use, 49% of its net capacity.
Lastly, my Passport serial number is WXD0A99X.1089 but I can’t see this range of characters listed on the WD website; can you advise me, please? The saves, on the other hand, appear to be happening as I update a document, which is ideal.
Patrick
18 Feb 13
DLG = Data Lifeguard Diagnostics
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