PLS Help! Can I recover my files from My Passport

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

Hello

yesterday My Passport worked fine.

Today however I can’t get access to it.

In Computer it shows de WD Smartware, but My Passport comes up as Local Station, and I can’t access it.

In Disk Management it also show Local Station and it says I have 100% free space which I know I do not have!

I’ve taken a backup from a few files, but not all.

I really need the files on My Passport back. 

Please help me!!! How can I get my files back??

Jef

2

Same problem here- not using Smartware, 'though. Day before yesterday the drive was fine, it stayed connected over night, and in the morning I couldn’t access it anymore. Any application that tries to access it freezes for several minutes to then spit out a message “Cannot connetct to drive E:. Wrong parameter.”

This is usually a sighn that the disk is dying. For a two month old disk that was NOT carried around a lot not much of a lifetime.

I opened the housing to see if I can connect the drive via SATA instaed of USB. Guess what, the USB3 port is soldered onto the controller platine, and there is no SATA connector.

I am trying to recover my files using among others TestDisk and PhotoRec, however, the disk is only found sporadicall by those two, and not at all by Recuva and many other recovery tools. When I do find it and try to read it I get a read error “Read after end of file” for every single sector.

Yesterday evening PhotoRec found the drive, and I let a recovery run ovedr night, but it didn’t locate a single file! And I know they have to be still on the disk, I am confident that only the partition or index is shot.

But it seems that not only the physical HDD design is propratory, but somehow normal deep inspection and data recovery techniques seem to fail as well for whatever reason.

Does anyone have an idea how to go about a low level file recovery on those kind of disks? Everything that used to work on other disks just fine seems to fail on this one :frowning:

There is “only” a 300GB music collection at stake that took me years to collect ans sort. As most of the music is from Netlabels and Podcats channels that seized to exist over the years I have no way to get the files back if I can’t recover them here.

3

Some people have had luck with TestDisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Joe

4

I am having the same problem.  3 hours ago it worked and now it is not booting up.  It has all of my pictures, music, and documents on it!!  I am not real happy and almost in tears.  Please give me a solution on how to fix this thing.

5

The passport shows up but it doesn’t show any memory space at all.  There is nothing under the file.

6

Hi, my WD Passport Essential for USB2.0 ahs also been giving me problems.  there are times is visible under my computer , other times it is not.  But today totally not visible cant access.  Drive is only 1 year 3 month old and treated with TLC(tender loving care) .  moved my OS from vista to windows 7 would that affect it? but after installing windows 7 it was working fine.

Please help!