WD My Passport Essential SE 1 TB not detected on PC or Mac

Hi

A few days ago I encountered a problem wth my 1TB WD My Passport Essential SE: windows refused to recogonize it. It would appear as “disk” in device manager but was nowhere to be found on explorer or Disk manager. However, upon disconnecting the drive a message would pop up saying that I have to format the drive before I can use it. I tried it on different PCs but the result was the same. The drive did, however, work on my Macbook. I decided to borrow an HDD so that I could copy all the data and then fromat the drive. But before I could get to that the drive stopped working with Mac too. It is recieving power and the drive is spinning, but the OSes refuse to recognize it. It appears in the BIOS, but not in the OS.

I have noticed that I’m not the only one suffering with this issue, so I assume it is a manufacturing defect. Will Western Digital be doing anything about it or am I stuck with a 100$ paper weight sans all my backup?

Thanks in advance

Raptor

If you need to recover your files, use a data recovery program and then format the passport. 

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

there are many topics on this forum with same exact issue. You can try using software, find data recovery company ($1000+ usually for this) to get it done if you have pending head damage, or forget about the back-up rebuild your data from scratch and RMA the drive. Usually those are only options. Running software recovery tools on drive with pending head damage however, could end badly (ie. permanent data loss due to platter damage caused by failed heads)