My Passport SE (USB 3.0) Issue, Do not wish to format

WD External and Portable SSD Portable SSD
1

Hello everyone,

I’m hoping someone might be able to help me with this troubeling issue of mine. I became a proud owner of a My Passport 1TB Unit quite a while ago, perhaps 6 months ago. Ever since I received the passport and installed the SmartWare application that was included with it, I was never able to update the software or the firmware due to an issue that it couldn’t find my unit. However it did show up in the SmartWare and figuring I could still access it and it was working fine I didn’t mind not updating it. 

But, today this changed. I was able to update the firmware and software and happily did so. HOWEVER! Now my SmartWare is not detecting my drive neither is the computer able to detect the drive. If I go into the control panel and look under what units are working it’s detecting my external harddrive and saying it’s working correctly but also showing that an unidentified unit is there. Deactivating and Activating it again does not work and I’ve tried uninstalling it from the system and plugging it back in however nothing works. I have very precious files on this external hardware and I must say I’m very dissapointed that such a problem has occured because of an update that I was finally able to do. I am running Windows 7 Professional 32-bit.

So please, if there is anyone that has a solution that does not require formatting this drive I will kindly appreciate it!

P.S. I’m getting the “No Writable WD SmartWare Partition Found”. Also the SmartWare tray is blinking with green and my harddrive is constantly uplighted with the LED light, or what kind of light it is.

I have now also noticed that I cannot even format this drive with the WD Quick Formatter.

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Dude, go to disk management (right -click on computer> manage> disk management) and see if the drive is there, if it’s not there then you can’t even format it to fix it. If the firmware update failed then it just killed the drive at a low-level and you’ll need to replace it. What you can try to do is another firmware update to see if it will recognize the drive and try to load it again, if that doesn’t work then you’ll have to contact a recovery tech.