I erased my disc. To make it work again I need to restore the WD software to my drive. The manual directs you to Knowledge Base answer ID 7. I can find nothing there that tells me how to restore the software to my drive. Can anyone tell me in simple language how I do it.
Thanks
Davidfison
All the WD software can be downloaded from the Downloads link at the very top of the forum (or click here).
Select your drive from the product box at the top of the page and click submit and you’ll be offered a menu of the software available for that drive type.
Generally the drives don’t actually need software to run - it is only supplied on the drive as an easy way to transport it to you and save having to download stuff. The software doesn’t need to be kept on the drive.
If you want to see the actual knowledge base article referred to by the manual, click here.
Thank you.
I had downloaded the software but cannot find a Set Up Wizard. Does thar matter?
Assuming it doesn’t then the next question is how do you unlock a disc as when I try to use it it says ;
- disc not configured (or some such)
- and/or disc locked
Any help would be greatly appreciated
Best wishes
David
The first thing that we need to know is exactly what product you’re talking about. WD makes many different ones, and how they work is somewhat different between them.
Disc locking is something a little different. If it’s a portable drive such as a MyPassport, then the drive should have a secondary partition which contains the unlocking software that should automatically run. And normally that partition should be read only and not be able to changed.
If you’re getting set-up or configuration errors, we’d need to know the exact issue and the exact error to be able to help more.
How did you erased your disc drive?? Did you just format or factory reset the drive or you used any 3rd party data eraser tool to erase the data permanently??
If you have used any 3rd party data eraser tool then you cannot restore any data even if you use any data recovery software because 3rd part data eraser tools erase the drives data beyond the scope of recovery.
I did not use any external software.
I just went to where it said ‘erase all data’ and clicked on that. I was following the My Passport user manual.
Any advice would be much appreciated
David
Darren,
Thanks for your help.
It is a 1TB My Passport PIN WDBYNNOO1OBBK.
I configured it to move files from a Mac to a Windows 10pc. Having done that I wanted to use it to back up my PC so I followed the Users Manual and erased the disc.
I have subsequently downloaded the software and when I click on set up your Back Up it goes through the first screen then says ‘No writable partition, Please make sure your drive is unlocked’
I have gone to security and put in my password and then deleted the need for a password but exactly the same thing happens when I try to set up my Back Up.
For info the WD Back Up is Version 1.9.7435.38388
I am hoping this gives you enough info to help me
Best wishes
David
I would wonder if it’s partition is configured for Mac, which by default Windows can’t read. This is why WD sell two different flavours of MyPassport, one for Windows and one for Mac. They come configured differently.
As a test, try grabbing one of the free software options listed in this article, install that on the PC and see if it can see/read the drive.
If it can then your drive is formatted for Mac, and will need to be reformatted to use with Windows. Normally NTFS is for Windows and HFS+ is for Mac (if I remember well, I don’t run any Mac’s), but you’d need something like exFAT to be compatible with both.
If it can’t see it then it’s something more serious, like a corruption of the drive.
