WD Passport not working - only on my laptop

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

Hi,

I’m having problems with WD Passport 350 gb hdd. It’s 2 years old now and it has served me quite well until recently. Some time ago I plugged it in my laptop (HP nx7400, running XP SP3) and it wasn’t recognized - first it made some clicking noise (not good, I know), then spontaneously decided to “be recognized” (started working normally for a few minutes), then it went off again (clicking noise) for no apparent reason, and it continued to go off and on until I unplugged it.

Just to be sure where to look for the problem I tried plugging it in other computers and it worked fine. I’d like to hope the disk isn’t defective, but I’m still reluctant to try out some of the advices I’ve read as I’m not too keen on hearing the clicking noise again (don’t want to damage the disk). Also, the USB ports are working correctly - I’ve plugged other devices to them, no problems observed.

Do you have any advice about what should I do?

Thanks in advance,

Marin

2

Try a different USB cable make sure it’s not over 18" long. It sounds like like it may be a power issue. WD makes a Y shaped Power booster cable that used 2 ports on PC. Sometimes that helps.

Joe

3

tnx for reply!

I’ll try it, but, I don’t understand how it would explain the disk working on other computers, just not on my laptop…

4

These drives are very sensitive to voltage and a lot of PCs use barely adequet power supplies. I prefer powered drives over USB powered. Something that may work is shut down and disconnect power to PC on a laptop remove the battery for 5-10 min then power backup. Sometimes that may fix an error with BIOS. I have seen some posts different places recommending that for unusual problems. Before the problem was this drive used between different OSs like XP and Windows 7? Sometimes that causes errors.

Joe