Wife has a 500 GB My Passport that looks to be 6-7 years old. She hardly uses it, just uses it store work files she might need down the road. All of a sudden it stopped working.
Plugging it into the desktop the light activates and can hear it spinning, but there is a ticking noise which has me concerned that the HD itself may be damaged. File Explorer will not detect the HD. When I go into settings the passport is listed under bluetooth & other devices and I’ve installed WD Drive Utilities which is detecting the drive but when I run drive status check it says SMART status failed. Any suggestions?
If there is a noise, then you can try the subsequent fixes which people have used to overcome the issue:
Check whether the hard drive is getting enough power or not. You can do it by plugging the power adapter directly into the power supply.
Replace the data cable with the new one and turn on the drive. Now, if it does not make any noise, then the data cable might be faulty.
In case the drive still makes noises, then there is a high possibility the drive is failing and needs to be replaced.
Further, you can also try Stellar Data Recovery software to recover your important data files from the affected drive before your data becomes unrecoverable.
