I’ve got an old WD Elements 2TB packed with Movies and Series that I wanted to connect to my Sony Smart TV. It didn’t register on my TV and after I reconnected it to my Windows 10 PC it will not register on that either There’s tons of data on this drive so I’d hate to loose it, but more importantly than that,…how do I get it to work again on a Windows 10 machine? Obviously connecting it to my Smart TV did something to it’s MBR partition or it would show up right?
Please, any help would be much appreciated!
I’m having a similar issue as this and the link the staff posted in reply to the post is an error link. I know this is an old post, but how can I get help?
I just bought a new 4TB WD and it instantly recognised on my pc so I transferred data to it. Then I connected it to my Smart TV’s set top box which told me to I had to register it which meant it would delete all the data. So I did that and now it won’t recognise on my Windows 11 PC.
The Smart TV says I have to eject the USB HDD instead of unplugging it but there isn’t a way to do that (that I can see)
My old WD Elements 1TB recognises on both PC and Smart TV without issue and doesn’t require registering or manually ejecting.
I don’t have DMDE - I don’t know what that is. I’m actually technology challenges - I’m just a user who went and bought a HDD from the store and plugged it in expecting it to work like me other one. My current 1TB WD Elements is about 10 years old and it’s starting glitching, so that’s why I wanted to get a replacement - the guy at the store recommended this 4TB one and said it would work the same way.
I suspect that your TV is limited to MBR partitions. Drives larger than 2TiB are usually partitioned in GPT mode, which your TV may not understand. There may also be an issue with the file system, ie FAT32 versus NTFS.
Also, I want to mention, I reviewed the following online resources and have already tried a lot of these steps. I couldn’t copy all the details here as I was getting limitation warnings, and I can’t upload either as I’m a new user So I’ve put all the steps and screenshots together and tried uploading it in a file sharing service: Data package from March 14th. - FileTransfer.io. Can you let me know if you can see that?
Your drive has had several partitions which were deleted and replaced with new partitions. The current status is that you have a small partition at sector 34 and a 4TB partition at sector 32768. Something has deleted the boot sectors of each partition. That’s why Windows can’t see them. Normally you should see EBCF in the Indicators column, but you have ExCF (the Boot sector is missing).
If you d-click the New Element NTFS volume and expand the $Root, do you see your missing file/folder tree?
I suspect what’s happened is when it’s been “registered” on the Smart TV set top box, it’s done something to change that. I can’t access the content we had stored there each time we’ve tried it. And I can’t seem to work out how to Unregister it from the Smart TV set top box.
When I open New Elements NTFS, I see $ Root Folder and when I click on that, I see a folder called “[…][+found]” but when click on it, it just returns me back to $Root
I think the most expedient option is a full scan. Hopefully DMDE will find you files.
That said, I believe your model is an SMR HDD. These support TRIM. If TRIM has been executed against your HDD after file deletion, then your prospects for recovery are very poor.
Thanks. I don’t know what SMR or TRIM are so I don’t really understand, but I’ll keep on it.
I’m not super worried about the files I had on there as they were just being used to test how it would work on the TV. My concern is how it doesn’t work from TV to PC and therefore rendering it basically unusable for the purpose I bought it for
There’s tons of data on this drive so I’d hate to loose it, but more importantly than that,…how do I get it to work again on a Windows 10 machine? Obviously connecting it to my Smart TV did something to it’s MBR partition or it would show up right?
So I’ve put all the steps and screenshots together and tried uploading it in a file sharing service: 
