WD My Passport Ultra no access

Excuse me for bad English, it is not my native language.

MY WD My Passport Ultra 2TB suddenly stopped working !
I bought it recently to store all my important files for a music project.
Everything is on this drive and it cannot be accessed on any pc or laptop anymore.
It does not show up in WD Drive Utitlities.
It does not show up in Windows10 disk management.
It does show up in device management.
After a long time , windows disk management says, this disk needs to be formatted !!
I really cannot loose my 6 weeks of hard work thats on this disk. :frowning:
Thanks in advance.

Thanks for your reply.
I tried several data recovery programs and no luck.
They do not even see the disk.
It shows up in disk management as “Not initialised”
When try to initialise it says failed.

I know it is not a good idea to not have a backup.
Since this disk was brandnew I guessed it would be fine. Wrong guess, lesson learned.
I have several other external harddrives that are over 10 years old and still perfect.

I did not expect this piece hardware to stop working only after nearly 4 months of use.

I will take it to a data recovery center

Hello!
All may not be lost. On aging computers the power supply may be failing.
There is hope!! :blush: All three of my drives failed at the same time. What are the odds. Statistically NOPE. I bought a POWERED USB Hub and suddenly all my drives worked again.
I believe many of our USB powered drives are not receiving enough power to run the drive motors. They show a light and may click but they don’t “Run”. By supplying the power they need, they are generally happy to do the work.
POWERED USB 3.0 Hubs are available from about $16 US and higher in cost. Remember that unless the hub has a separate power supply you are reducing power for worse results. With your hub plugged into BOTH the computer and a SEPARATE power supply, you are likely to be back and operating. I accidentally disconnected my Hub from power and my drives failed again, plugged in the separate power and it was like a miracle. All my drives worked when I gave them enough power.

Whenever there is “disk unknown not initialized” issue occurs, your hard drive may show unallocated space in Disk Management, and the data on which will be inaccessible or else there is another situation: there is no disk space shown in Disk Management.

Below are the 2 different methods to resolve the issue:

Method 1. Use Disk Management to fix not initialized error on an external hard drive

  1. Connect the uninitialized external hard drive to your PC.
  2. Press Win + R keys, type: diskmgmt.msc and hit Enter.
  3. Find the uninitialized, unknown external hard drive with I/O device error > Right-click on it and select Initialize Disk.
  4. Then set the disk to initialize and set the disk as MBR or GPT.

After this, you may reboot your PC and keep all changes. Now, your external hard drive will be recognized and read by Windows again.

Method 2. Run CMD to repair I/O device error on not initialized external hard drive

This CMD command would erase all data on the uninitialized hard drive, which you can later restore after repairing the external hard drive not initialized, with the help of any data recovery or partition recovery software:

  1. Press Win+R > Type: diskpart and hit Enter.
  2. Type: list disk and hit Enter.
  3. Type: select disk F and hit Enter; (replace F with the drive letter of an uninitialized external hard drive) .
  4. Type: clean and hit Enter.
  5. Type: convert gpt or convert mbr and hit Enter.
  6. Type: create partition primary and hit Enter.
  7. Type: format quick fs=ntfs and hit Enter.
  8. Type: assign and hit Enter.
  9. Type: exit and hit Enter.

To recover your data from the affected drive you need the help of a reliable data recovery software. Here, I suggest you to check out Stellar Data Recovery Professional Software to recover your data from the affected drive.