I have just entered a support ticket but it’s the weekend so I thought I’d see if anyone else had this issue and how it was resolved. My portable drive stopped connecting with my computer, intermittently at first and now 100%. I already ordered a new cord and just tried it and that was not the issue. It appears that my drive can only be recognized if I put a lot of pressure on the cord to connect to the drive which takes 2 hands to accomplish and doesn’t allow me to actually access the drive with no hands to operate my computer.
Any suggestions? If I get an answer from tech support that works I’ll follow up here with the answer for anyone else this may happen to
Sounds like your usb port may be damaged. If you haven’t already done so, copy everything on it to another location/drive.
Look inside the port on the drive and make sure there’s no dust, debris, lint or other material that may interfere with the connection. I had an issue like this with an old iphone and it turned out to be a bunch of packet lint in the port.
If you have access to one, I’d try another cord (borrow one). Try your old cord with another USB drive (maybe borrow one). If you bought a cheap, new cable from places like Amazon, eBay or other sites, those cables are cheap for a reason. So mix/match to narrow down that it’s the drive.
Is it a Passport? Some models (eg 4TB) develop dry solder joints at a zero-ohm resistor near the USB connector. If this is your problem, reflowing the solder to this resistor will fix it.
