I’m not sure exactly when this started, but I just did a fresh install of Windows 7 (64-bit), and my external USB HDD is showing as a local disk in My Computer. Before the re-install, it was always shown as removable storage. I don’t have anything on the disk, so I did a quick format in Windows. That did not solve the problem. It’s not really a huge problem, but it seems to engage much more slowly when I plug it in the USB port than it did before. I have enabled quick removal in policies as well. In addition, I noticed that WD SmartWare would not run properly from a brand new installation (I used the latest update from WD). I already ran chkdsk and there were no errors on the drive.
Welcome to the Community danny. Are you able to copy any files to the Passport or have yo tried connecting the Passport to another PC to verify if the same problem happens?
I don’t have another PC available right now, but I did confirm that I could transfer to and from the drive to my internal hard drive no problem.
I ran the Windows Experience Index today as I was experiencing some slowdowns. My disk access score went down quite a bit, and I think it’s because My Passport is recognized as a local partition. Furthermore, in Speccy, the external drive is shown as a “(USB (SATA))” device. As I said before, I don’t have anything important on there, but I plan to use it for photo backup, so I’d like to get this thing back to normal sometime soon. I will try different configurations in BIOS to see what’s up.
