Wd Passport Essential not found by Windows 7 64bit

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

My WD Passport Essential used to run perfectly well on Windows XP on my old pc. I have just bought a new pc with the new windows 7 64bit os and that’s when the problems started.

When I plug in the USB cable, windows 7 does not find the drive. I have tried many different forums with suggestions about changing drive letters etc in disk management, but nothing works. I have phoned  WD help line many times telling them about this problem but got no where, they kept telling me it was a windows issue and there is nothing they can do.

Today however, I finally got somewhere, WD help desk have told me that my passport essential has a driver issue with windows 7 64bit and they are working on a update as we speak. Couldn’t give me a time frame, but hopefully soon. This problem only seems to be happening with the 64bit version of windows 7 and not the 32bit. Why there should be a difference between the two I don’t know. Here’s hoping I will be able to get to all my music and photo’s shortly, that I have saved of the Passport Essential.

2

Wow, thats very strange, I have the opposite  problem. It no longer  works in Vista.

I’m curious, does your WD show in the device manager or disk manager?

http://community.wdc.com/t5/My-Passport-for-PC/WD-Passport-wont-create-drive-letter-anymore-Vista/td-p/16530

3

Hi

No my passport doesn’t show in the device manager or disk manager. Windows 7 doesn’t even bleep etc when you plug it in. The passport does light up though so I know it must be getting power.

4

But XP, at least, knows there is a USB device when connected.

And this passport has been working fine in the past.

I got another Passport which works fine on the same USB posrt.

And the “troubled” passport works fine on another computer !!!

What needs to be running/ device driver on XP? 

5

Does antone know where I can find the driver for wd1600mb the drive is not detected in device mgr. cause it has no driver

Help would be apperciated

6

I have exactly the same problem for Windows 7 32 Gb OS.

The driver is not found and WD do not have a driver, they say it is recognised by the OS

7

I just bought one of the 750G Passport SE’s and my Windows 7 laptop wouldn’t see it all.  Not even a popup saying a new device had been plugged into my USB port.

I then connected it to my XP PC and it found it.  After the installation process, I updated the firmware.  I then moved it back to my Windows 7 laptop and this time it found the drive and installed the drivers without any problems.

It appears that despite it being new, the firmware that was on it out of the box did not support Window’s 7.