recently (around march 27) I plugged my WD elements hard drive into my pc and it states " the last device you connected malfunctioned and windows doesn’t recognize it" and when I check the plugged in devices in settings it just says "unknown USB device (set address failed)
Its nowhere to be found on my pc, It doesn’t appear in file explorer and doesn’t appear in device manager. I’ve read around on here and it seems alot of people have this very issue, an I’ve tried all the solutions I read about including updating drivers, uninstalling problematic windows updates, using different USB ports/ cables, disabling and re-enabling the drive, uninstalling and reinstalling the drive, turned off USB selective suspend, even buying an extension usb, I plugged it into another windows 11 pc and a windows 10 pc. I’ve tried it all, the only thing I have yet to try is re formatting my Hard drive, but the reason being is I don’t want to lose the data I have on it I have no back up data for it.
and my drive doesn’t even appear on data recovery software so I can’t simply buy a new HD and just transfer the data onto the newer one.
And alot of the “set address failed” posts I read are from 2015-2020 and I really need to know if anyone now in 2025 are having this nightmare of an issue. Both so I know if im not alone with this issue nowadays, and because all the solutions I’ve tried may be outdated.
Im not very computer literate so I know next to nothing about these kind of complex and out of nowhere issues. But I would greatly appreciate assistance and a solution to this situation, wether it be from WD support or some other poor souls with this problem
