I have a 500Gb MyPassport Essential, for christmas this past year. I haven’t had a use for it until recently.
So i open it, and the first thing i do is format the drive into 2 partitions, one 400 gig NTFS, and the second was whatever odd number of bytes the remaining space was, also in NTFS. and for the sake of details, this partitioning was done on a Windows 7 laptop. and the drive was removed using the safely eject hardware icon in the notification area.
Now, I move over to my windows XP desktop, which had the data that i wanted to back up. i already had the data i wanted backed up all moved into a singe folder, and it was about 300 gigs of data. so i just do a simple drag and drop into the 400 gig partition. the computer estimated the transfer time as a few hours, so i go and do some errands that I had to do. when i come back to the computer some 3 hours later to check on the progress, i have several messages on the screen saying something about an I/O device error , and that the data transfer was unexpectedly halted(and the drive was no longer listed under the drives cnnected under My Computer). The sefely eject hardware wouldnt work, so i just did a computer shutdown. when i turn the computer it says the drive isnt formatted, and it gives me the option to format it, so i did. And then the hours of frustration began. after attempting to format the drive for 2 DAYS the format screen says error formatting and exits out. So then I moved over to my laptop. same as windows XP, no matter how i choose to format it(well, i was able to create a small 2 gig partition as a test, but that went away on reboot). After that, i move over to the desktop running a Gparted live CD. even Gparted hung up on formatting the drive, and didnt output ANY errors. grr… :cry:
So i have officially given up hope on the drive, and i just filled out some RMA stuff that popped up when i checked warrenty stuff. and I have to pay to ship my defective product to WD so they can send me a replacement? is there any way around having to pay just so i can get a drive that is working? is there any way i could deal with this through best buy to save myself the shipping costs? i’m a cheap man, and dont mind waiting a little longer if i dont have to pay, its not urgent 
But other than that, what did i do wrong? It doesnt seem like it could be a defective cable, what caused this?
sorry for the long post, i’ve been working this over in my mind for a few days, and i just want answers, it would really be appreciated :smileyvery-happy:
