I have spent *hours* scouring the web on this topic. Even broke down and sent a message to WD support. No answers anywhere.
I have a My Passport exernal HDD. I realize Passports are sold as Mac drives but I was assured reformatting in a NTFS system would solve that problem. And it did. The drive worked a few weeks then quit. Not in device manager or disk manager or anywhere.
Here are some of the things I’ve tried so far (You may notice that I am getting more and more desparate)
-
Switched USB cables
-
Tried drive on other computers - Windows 8 (No joy) and Windows XP (Mom said she had no trouble with it on XP).
-
Installed, unstalled, ran in XP compatibility mood, rebooted, plugged in drive, installed driver, then tried installing driver before plugging in drive (catch my drift?)
-
Updated ALL drivers on the Win 7 machine
-
Tried to update firmware (quite impossible of course - wish I’d thought to ask Mom to do it on her XP machine
-
Put my left foot, took my left foot out, did the hokey-pokey (sorry to non-native English speakers that don’t catch the allusion
-
Tried running it through USB hub (used to be no problem), then tried plugging it directly in.
-
Investigated with programs that should have recognized a Mac file system
-
Removed my Windows account password (not sure what that was supposed to do, but I found it on some website or another)
-
I’m sure there are many other things I’ve tried but all to no avail
Very rarely, the computer will recognize the drive for a very brief period. On these occasions I am prompted to format the drive.
I really hope someone can help. Important stuff on the drive and I’ll also need it to transfer files to the new Win 8.1 PC.
Thanks!
