I’m a newbie here and I was given a brand new WD Passport Essential 1TB as a present. I’ve been using it for about 2 months, mostly to back up my essential files and folders. I only connect this to my laptop when I need to use it.
Two days ago, I needed to access a driver to reinstall for my laptop and when I went into my WD to access it, I could not do so because the driver program have been changed. The icon has become one of those that usuallyt represesnts an unknown application or program. I cannot delete it and I cannot copy it to my laptop.
On one occasion on another file, with the same unknown program icon, it says the file name is too long. But it allow me to change the file name and the icon then switched to a workable and recognisable icon as it should.
I also noticed that when I backed up my files to WD, it changed some of my file name to something just about recognisable.
I’ve tried to move/copy the whole folder to my laptop hoping this will revert all my files back to normal. But it does not let me make a copy to move to.
Does anyone know what is causing this and how to rectify this ? Otherwise, this external hard drive is as good as being useless given it’s unreliability.
Any comments, help and suggestions will be greatefully accepted.
I have written to them and have today received their reply which I feel does not answer the question as to the cause as non of what they described applies given . Here is their answer for your ref:
Thank you for contacting Western Digital Customer Service and Support. My name is xxxxxxx
I am sorry to hear you are having problems with your Passport drive. If the device is seen in your system, but you are unable to access the information in it then it could well be corrupted. If the drive is not spinning up fully when you connect it then this could indicate that the cable has become faulty, is the connection to the drive good or is it loose in anyway?
There are many different data recovery software’s that you can try and recover corrupt data from the drive, some of them available for free trial, but I cannot recommend any by name as we do not make them. Once the data has been recovered you may be able to get the drive ready for use again by formatting it, this will erase all the data from the drive but will normally solve any corruption issues outright:
The suggestions seems to be a temporary solution. So does this mean everytime I have a corrupted file, I should reformat ? Then what is the point of having this hard drive as a storage device ? This makes me feel that this drive is unreliable unless there is a concrete answer as to the cause or a fix to it.
