WD Passport does not show up

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

I have a 1tb passport external hard drive. All of a sudden it doesn’t show up on my pc (Windows 8.1).
I get the bleeping sound when I connect it to my pc, but it does not show in the pc folders or the drive manager.

It lights up and I’ve unplugged it and used a different cable, but still nothing shows up at all.

I found a couple of old threads on this, but I only saw an answer to what to do if it shows up in device manager but not on the computer. There was nothing posted about what to do if the device does not show up anywhere.

What to do?

2

Hi chesterv,

Did you check My Passport in Disk Management?

If not, then check if the drive is seen in Disk Management. The partition on the drive should be labeled NTFS or ExFAT and should have a drive letter assigned. Drive capacity and partition health can also be viewed.
If the drive does not say Healthy, or shows the file format as RAW, then the partition would become corrupt. It could also be corrupt if the bar above the drive is black and shows as Unallocated.