Hello,
(I posted to WD forums but got no response).
We have issued several clients WD Passport external HDD. Recently there have been a few only showing up in Devices & Printers rather than under My Computer > Drives with Removeable Storage. These hard drives are only a year old and I don’t think the drive is faulty, as it’s being detected as an External HDD Storage Device with no errors or warnings. It’s just not showing up in the right place, so we can’t open them to get the files https://speedtest.vet/ .
We’ve tried different USB cables, computers, uninstalling/re-installing USB drivers.
I recently took one physically apart and saw there is no SATA connection. Just Googled it and it’s something WD stopped doing - the HDD is microUSB ONLY, so I am unable to plug it into a SATA port and use it that way.
Is there anything we can do to get the data off of these drives? I was hoping I could go into Disk Management and re-assign a drive letter but nope. Says it needs to be re-initialized which would result in data loss if I remember correctly.
Photos of the drive: {REMOVED - PCBA has USB rather than SATA}
If this is a known problem, does anyone have recommendations on a better external HDD to give to clients?
