I have been using My Passport to back up all my data from my laptop. I just tried to retreive some files, and the drive was not recognized. When I check My Computer, it did not show as an external drive. I refreshed and it seemed to find the drive, but said the drive needed to be formatted before use. I really don’t want to format and loose all my backup data. Is there a way to get the drive to be recognized? Can I use other style of cables? It is presently a USB3 cable connecting to the laptop.
I too have the same problem, I have some picyures their that are irreplacable.
Don’t know if this will help or not, but I was stumped at trying to get the info off my WD drive until someone suggested I try to get it with a Mac laptop. An associate from work brought his in to try, and it worked. All information was available, which we copied to the laptop and then to a new WD drive. (I have trust issues with the one that I couldn’t open)
Not only did I get all information off the old drive and onto a newer 1TB drive The old one is now being read by my laptop.
I also have now made it a ritual to safety remove and dissconnect the drive every time - one reason that was explained to me - if the drive was in the middle of either a save or a retreive when unplugged, it could corrupt the WD drive
Good Luck
It’s probably a corruption problem. Something like TestDisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk might fix it. Sometimes you can gain access to drive by booting from a Linux Live CD. And there is data recovery software. Recuva http://www.piriform.com/recuva is a free one.
Joe
