WD Passport 0740 not recognised

Seems I have the same problem as many people on this forum, after hours of searching on the internet, I hope to get some joy here!

  • Running WIndows 7 Pro with all updates.
  • Drive is not recognised on either of my two USB ports.
  • The ext drive blue light is on flashing.
  • The “Safely remove hardware” icon is visible identifying the drive “My Passport 0740”.
  • Uninstalled driver in Device Manager and rebooted/reinstalled driver.
  • In Computer Management it’s showing “Disk 1 unknown, not initialised”. When trying to initialise with both options, it gives message, “Device could not be initialised because of an i/o device error.”
  • I read somewhere else about reassigning drive letters, do I need to do that, if so, how?
  • Would recent updates with in Windows 7 have contributed to this?

Thanks for your attention, I have alot of valuable data on here which took me days to back up.

Hi and welcome to the WD Community.

Normally the I/O error is related to the connection of the drive or the PC 

Have you tried using a data recovery software to see if you can recover the files?