I have a 1.5TB WD passport drive that I have had for 2 years or so. It has worked fine in that time as attached storage. We moved recently and was shut down and transported in the family car, not the moving van. When we got to the new location, and plugged it in, it is no longer recognized by any computers we have plugged it into either in hardware management or on the windows explorer(original cables and same configuration as before). The power light came on in the front and it sounded like the disc spun up, I heard a few clicks from the heads reading the drive and then no change from that point. I tried a number of options to see if I could get it to be recognized to no avail. I tried plugging into different USB ports, differnt OS’s (XP, 7, Mac), shutting down with it plugged in to see if it can read on startup, disk repair, but nothing lets me see the drive. I have had other drives fail in the past and have had very good luck in pulling the drive from the machine and plugging into another to retrieve the data. I therefore pulled the drive and plugged it into the USB port of my laptop via an interface cable I got from my IT department which is what they use to save data off of drives with corruption. There is still no recognition. I know the disc is spinning because I feel the resistance when picking up the drive (carefully) when plugged in (conservation of angular momentum). I’m open to any suggestions before I send it off to pay $500-$1500 to get the data retrieved. Thanks in advance.
Hi Dead_ Man
Interesting …I have a 2 TB MY Book Essential Hard Drive. It is about 6 to 9 months old.
I am having exactly the same issue that started a few days ago.
I am sure it is working but none of my computers or media player can see it when I plug it in.
The computer gives the tone sound when you plug in to the USB port but nothing after that.
So there is no access to it.
Help us Please.
Puppa
my passport is not showing up on my laptop
We see these things come at least twice a week for recovery. If your passport is not mounting there is no software that will detect it. Before DDI 4 with USB add on came out the only way proper way to get data from these drives was to convert to SATA - Image - and decrypt if needed. Now with DDI 4 + USB add on drive can most likely be simply imaged.
We actually received one of these same symptom drives yesterday, drive had bad sectors so could not mount. But after converting to SATA, imaging, and decrypting 100% of data was retrieved. Feel free to pm me if you have any questions regarding recovery procedure.
