WD Passport WDXMS1200 not compatible with Windows 8

I bought the WDXMS1200 external hard drive about 6 years ago. It’s 120GB. When I try to use it with my new laptop running Windows 8 64-bit it comes up as “USB malfunctioned” – has anyone else ran into this problem? The support people said it wasn’t compatible with Windows 8. 

Any solutions on how to retrieve the files without having to go buy a new external hard drive and copy the files to it? 

Thanks in advance!

Jaime Odom

It could be rather slow, but there are flash drives out there which hold a large fraction of this drive’s capacity. 32 and 64 GB flash drives are not dreadfully expensive and could allow you to shuttle the data off the old drive.