Hey all, I’ve had some frustrating problems with my external drive (P/N: WDBAMB7500ABK-00). Last night it worked perfectly, but today it isn’t even showing up in disk management. It’s taken a fall or two to the soft carpet floor from a height of about 16 inches, but I don’t think this should be a problem.
Why is my wd passport not recognised on any device i plug it into WD Passport-Can find in Device Mgr, not in comp WD Passport doesn 't show up in My Computer or Disk Management. WD Community WD My Passport not showing up. WD Community| It's taken a fall or two to the soft carpet floor from a height of about 16 inches, but I don't think this should be a problem. I'm sorry, but those 16 inches are more than enough to damage a drive.
When I plug the drive in, the light comes on, and it beeps. It beeps five times, making a lower tone for about one second and a higher for about half a second, with a pause of about 1 second between each pair of beeps. Is this an error code?
I’ve tried plugging it into another computer, but it doesn’t show up there either (it should be noted that said computer has very finicky USB ports). I’m using the cable that was included with the drive. Should I be able to recover data from my drive? I have my music stored on it along with some photos and videos, and I’d really like to get these off. Thanks for any help, Trey.
It’s taken a fall or two to the soft carpet floor from a height of about 16 inches, but I don’t think this should be a problem. I’m sorry, but those 16 inches are more than enough to damage a drive beyond repair. And more than once, it’s a miracle it lasted this long. Remember, a drive has a platter(s) spinning at more than 5,000 rpms. If that head hits the platter, it can take chunks out of it destroying your data permanently.
An internal hard drive that’s been dropped a mere half an inch can be seriously damaged. Once a drive is running, you shouldn’t even move it because of the wear stress that it produces on the spindle motor. Spinning drives in both laptops and pcs that are moved around a lot can expect to have much higher and quicker failure rates. My passport just started to do this as well and I have only used it like 4 times. I agree that is absolutely ridiculous that this portable harddrive can’t sustain a fall to a carpet.
Why would I purchase a portable one then? Does wd think that I am going to transport this around in a huge padded case? Besides, this isn’t the first time this has happened to an external harddrive I’ve had from WD.
My other one was non-portable and sat on my desk and just stopped working one day. If you look all over the internet, it appears to be a very common problem. Time to switch to Seagate. I am not able to access my picture and data files that have been stores on my external hard drive either. Unfortunately, this is where I backed up all of my pictures and data.
For many things on this hard drive I have no other copies. I recently took my external hard drive to Best Buy - Geek Squad to see if the files could be recovered without going thru a great expense. The technician removed the drive from it’s case to see if he could assess the file directly but it only said raw drive.
The technician has told us that my external hard drive has lost its partition table so now no computer can read from it. It needs software to rebuild table to then read the hard drive. Do you think this program would be able to rescue my data?? Other things I have tried:. connecting to different computers.
connected external hard drive to computer using a new USB cable. Hello everyone i am going through the same nightmare and WD just left its customers to their own devices. We invested a fortune in their company by buying their products so why couldn’t they find an answer once for all?
I spent sleepless nights trying to sort this out and recover all my works and private photos and videos. Why should i pay for data recovery service when i bought a produc that was working perfectly and then decide to stop working? I WILL APPRECIATE IF SOMEONE that has managed to sort it out can give us a reply.thanks. This is indeed one of the most worthless devices i have ever bought in my whole life. The story that it is because it might have dropped is complete bull.bleep. I have another drive for 2 years now that has always travelled with me and never ever had any problems, this WD piece of garbage i heve for 10 days now and has not been dropped whatsoever, yesterday it was ok and since today not a single computer is recognising it!!!
On the website there are only software updates and no complete software, but if the piece of garbage is not recognised at all how the hell can just an update help me then??? I have copied around 200 GB on it and then cleaned the original pc where the data came from now leaving me with all the data gone. This is a very expensive lesson, never ever buy anything of this brand in my whole life again!!!
Update: After about 3 weeks. I plugged in again into my MacBook and left it there. After more than an hour I came back and the drive showed up on my Mac again. (So somehow the problem got fixed.) I ran First Aid on Mac's Disk Utility. It says the drive appears to be OK.
So I don't know what fixed it exactly. Problem: When I plug my WD Passport Ultra 4TB external hard drive WDBBKD0040BBK-0A (with 2TB of family photos) into my MacBook Pro it has fast flashing of light and can't be mounted. It can be read on a Windows laptop (after Windows automatically fixed an error). I tried opening up Disk Utility on my Mac, but it just spins forever trying to mount the external hard drive. Nothing ever shows up on Disk Utility. How it broke: The WD Passport Ultra was plugged into my MacBook on battery. I was not actively reading or writing to the external hard drive, but it did have a list of directories open (no individual photo files, but just the directory names).
The battery ran out. When I charged up my Mac again it says that the disk was not ejected properly. Ever since that my WD hard drive has the flashing problem and can't be mounted on my Mac.
I tried changing the Mac laptop, changing the USB cord, same problem. I then plugged in my WD hard drive to a Windows laptop. It says that it detected an error and had the option of automatically fixing it. I clicked 'Start' and let it ran, but it didn't have a progress bar and just had a 'Cancel' button. After running for 3-5 minutes, my mom came in and unplugged the external hard drive forcefully (I yelled at her for doing that).
We tried plugging it into the Windows laptop again, and my files and photos could be read!! But it still can't be read on Mac and has the flashing problem. Why is it like this?
What is broken? How can I test what is broken? I'm asking because I have had accidentally unplugged other WD external hard drives without ejecting in the past while not writing data, like in this case, but the drives never broke.
What is up in this case? I'm curious if this is something that happens a lot or if it's just a less durable hard drive I got. Because I'm at a point where WD's warranty can give me a new drive to replace it, or I can fix this drive myself.
(I have copied the photos out to a new drive on a Windows machine.) Because if it is something that happens with the same frequency in all drives, shouldn't I just fix it? What is the best free software program on Windows that might potentially fix my problem? Mac programs are good too if they can actually access it since my Mac can't even mount it. As you have backed up the photos on the windows machine, you should try to use disk utility to fix your drive. There might be a volume mounting error or a format error, which can be fixed by using a function in disk utility called 'first aid'. On your Mac, spotlight search for disk utility.
It should show up. When it opens you should see a column on the left with all your disks listed there. As you can see, this column has both internal and external drives listed there. Be extremely careful, do not tamper with the internal drives. Go over the list very carefully and select your external drive. It should be fairly obvious which one it is. In your case it should be labeled as something similar to WD passport ultra.
If not, you can look at the storage capacity and check if it matches with your disk's (here, 4TB). Next you need to run first aid. A self explanatory button placed towards the start of the row on the top says first aid. Click and let the magic happen!
If it doesn't start right away, you may have a different version of macOS. In the case of this, click on verify the disk.
Next, click on repair. While doing this, please make sure no one yanks the cable out because that will be very, very bad. If these situations occur:. You see the output The volume 'diskname' appears to be OK., but the problem still isn't fixed or. You see the output Scan complete.
Problems were found, but Disk First Aid cannot repair them. Then you can try to install and use DiskWarrior or try other solutions given on this thread. You could also try reformatting the disk, the steps for which I can edit in later. @jksoegaard's method looks promising too.
For Macs, if your External Hard Drive is not showing up in Disk Utility. And you have ruled out damaged drive and cable.
The next step you should try is using Terminal. Search Bar: Terminal. Type diskutil list, press enter. Find the Name of your External Hard Drive, it should show up here if it is not damaged. The External Hard Drive name is the next line under EFI EFI. Example 'Productivity', 'Universal' etc.
If name is Universal, Type diskutil mount Universal, press enter (instead of typing the name of the drive, you can also type in the identifier, eg. 'disk3s1, disk2s1, etc') The External Drive should show up on Finder or Desktop. Good Luck, hope that works for you.