I have a WD My Passport 500 GB USB external hard drive that is not being reconized by Windows. I runed my computer off on a Friday and turned it back on on Monday and nothing. I have replaced the USB cable and tried plugging into other computers with the same results. I can plug the drive in and I can hear the audible sound Windows makes. I can also click on the unmount USB icon in the system tray and it shows the drive there to be able to unplug it. But Windows never assigns a drive letter. I have tried using testdisk to repair the drive or to recover files but it doesn’t show up iin the available devices. In Windows computer management the drive shows up under the device manager under disk drives but not under storage Disk Management. I downloaded WD Lifegaurd Diagnostic Utility. It recognizes a drive is connected and passes the quick test and the extended test and it shows that both pass. However it says the drive is 0.0 GB (see image below). I have also tried several other file recovery programs with the same results. They do not see that a drive is attached.From all the posts I have read, it appears to be a bad partition. But any program I have tried to use to repair the partition will not recognize the drive. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
You can try writing zeros to the drive and then partition it again. However, this will delete all data stored on it. If this does not work then you will have to replace it.
