WD Mypassport unlocked but diskmgmt says it is unallocated!

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

Hi
Would appreciate anyone helping me out! :slight_smile:
My WD Mypassport which worked regularly suddenly is not recognized by my Laptop (Windows 10).
I can use the WD Unlocker but the data disk on diskmgmt comes up as unallocated.

I’ve googled the problem a bit and was able to do a few things -

  • Tried in other PC with the usb hub at the back - can unlock but still not recognized by PC
  • convert from offline to online in disk management
  • convert to MBR from GPT
  • try to change the name of the drive letter (cannot as it’s greyed out). Changing the drive letter of the WD Unlocker portion as someone suggested elsewhere and restarting the PC hasn’t helped either.
  • Rescanning disk in Disk mgmt was of no use
  • A Surface test with EaseUS partition has come up with no errors.

Any help is much appreciated!

2

Hi @Katieontherun,

Have you opened a Support Case? If not opened, for more information, please contact the WD Technical Support team for the best assistance and troubleshooting:
https://support-en.wd.com/app/ask

3

Hi,
According to me your drive has been turned raw.
An external storage drive becomes unallocated when its file system turns corrupt. This happens when any virus harms the file system, or when the disk drive has bad sectors. The unallocated drive is not visible in File Explorer, but its status can be verified from Disk Management. Also, all the data stored on the unallocated drive can’t be accessed. You need to fix the unallocated disk drive first to access this data.
So i am sharing with you the steps what you can do:

A. Enable the unallocated device using Device Manager

  1. Press the Windows key, then type ‘computer management’. Press Enter to open the utility.
  2. Go to System Tools > Device Manager.
  3. On the “Device Manager” pane, expand the “Disk drives” node.
  4. Right-click the USB flash drive with the down-facing arrow and select “Enable device”.

B. Convert the unallocated drive to RAW drive using Disk Management

  1. On the Computer Management utility, go to Storage > Disk Management.

  2. Right-click the unallocated USB flash drive and select “New Simple Volume.”

  3. On “New Simple Volume Wizard”, click Next. Click Next again to specify volume size.

  4. Click Next to assign the highlighted drive letter.

  5. Select “Do not format this volume” then click Next.

  6. Click Finish. The unallocated drive will now convert to RAW drive and it will be visible in File Explorer without any storage size.
    C. Recover data by using data recovery software
    D: Format the RAW disk drive to create a new file system

  7. Go to “File Explorer” and right-click the RAW disk drive.

  8. Click Format from the context menu.

  9. On the Format dialog box, let the default settings be selected and click Start. The unallocated drive is now formatted with the NTFS file system by using the “Quick Format” algorithm.

E. Restore the recovered files to the formatted USB disk drive

After formatting the RAW disk drive, you can access it normally. But the formatted drive will now be empty. You need to restore the files to the newly formatted drive. Steps are as follows:

  1. Navigate to the location wherein the files are recovered.
  2. Copy the required files.
  3. Paste the copied files to the newly formatted disk drive.

That’s it. You’ve recovered your lost data from the unallocated disk drive.

So First off, enable the unallocated disk drive by using Disk Manager. Then, convert the unallocated drive to the RAW drive by using Disk Management. Once your drive is visible in File Explorer, you can use a data recovery software such as Stellar Data Recovery to recover your lost data from the RAW drive.
Next, format the RAW disk drive to create a new file system. Finally, restore the recovered files to the formatted disk drive.