My Passport Essential 500 GB P/N WDBAAA5000ABK-00, has packed up after minimal use and is unreadable. I have had it a few months but have been unable to use it due to me working away from home a lot. I am the owner of two older model WD Passports which have performed flawlessly for years.
I am running Vista Home Premium. Last Friday I backed up some video and photos that were clogging up my PC’s hard drive using drag and drop. I left the Passport plugged in overnight with the PC switched on. When I tried to access the Passport the following day it wasn’t recognised by the PC.
I have spent hours trawling through the web and forums, trying to find a solution to my problem, to no avail. I have spoken to WD tech support but they could only tell me to try things I have already researched or to format the drive.
I am reluctant to format the drive (though I don’t think I can) as it has 5 GB of precious videos of my son at on it.
The drive shows up in device manager as ‘WD My Passport 07A USB Device’. It is also visible in Disk Manager as an unknown and not initialized drive with 2TB (2047.35Mb to be exact) of unallocated space! What is going on this is a 500 GB disk?
The drive can be heard spinning up and down for about 30sec but autoplay does not pop up on the PC screen.
I cannot format or install new firmware as WD Smartware software does not give me an option to enter my password. WD smartware detects the Passport but the caption states that ‘No writeable SmartWare partition found.’
I think that the drive firmware or hardware could be the problem. As I said before it has had minimal use and has never been dropped or shocked.
I have thought of trying to connect directly to the disk but these new passport SATA HDDs have a dedicated board with a USB socket and what appears to be a 12 pin array designed to connect to a proprietary socket.
I know others are experiencing similar problems, namely the fact that the unrecognised unmountable passport drive shows capacity of 2Tb. I am reluctant to exchange or format my drive in case a fix materialises. A way to plug into the 12 pins on the removed passport HDD may be a way forward.
Any suggestion for a route to a fix will be graciously received. From what I have seen in this forum more problems are going to plague owners of the new gen passport.
You should contact WD’s Technical Support for a power booster cable. You can also buy one online at the WDStore. You can do so either by phone or email. It’s a shot, but you may not be getting enough power to the drive.
Thank you for your thoughts. I was considering giving the power cable option a try too as a last resort.
I just heard back from WD support, who seem to think that it is the drive hardware due to the fact that I can hear the motor cycling for about 30sec…
I woked out that I have probably transferred about 30Gb to the drive, I bought it to organise my photo collection with the intention of making a backup of the organised collection on another drive. IE have two backups.
If you consider the time it takes to put 30gb onto the drive (NOT LONG) that is how much I have used it. I am not happy.
5gb of this was HD Video of which I have no back up copy. I have learned my lesson the hard way.
Make sure you have created to copies before erasing the original!
The local recovery company recommended by WD wants a minimum of $600 to recover the data on a no recovery no fee basis.
Boot useing Acronis WD edition, if ithe drive shows up in the DOS user interface as ‘my passport’ you can make an image of the whole drive using sector by sectore if you have suficent space available (up to 500gn) if not use acronis default settings will produce a much smaller image file (up to 300mb), your video files can be recoverd from this image at a later date.
Wipe the drive clean under DOS, format it NTFS, and you are back to square one, up-date the firmware, the formatting will not have erased the original firmware, think twice about useing Smartware, the free copy of Acronis is in my opinion much more suitable for incremental back-ups and hardly uses any resouces.
I bought my 500GB WD Passport about a year ago and use it frequently on my Mac. I actually backed up information onto yesterday morning and had it connected to my laptop throughout the day.
At a time when I wasn’t using my Passport at all an error message popped up: “The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer” with options to Initialze… Ignore or Eject. Choosing Initialize it brings me to Disk Utilities where it suddenly lists my hard drive as 2TB and will not let me repair or read the disk.
I am not tech savvy but I try. Following forums I downloaded TestDisk and tried to recover my hard drive to no avail.
I also brought it to two stores yesterday who made passive attempts to read the drive and said that it would cost anywhere from $600 - $1200 to fix. I will lose some important info but have a majority of my work saved to another hard drive and am not too upset.
I’m posting to the forum to note this reoccuring problem and if you find a solution to please post it. I do not plan on wiping the drive in case there is a solution.
Hello all, megart04 i´ve got exactly the same problem as you but otherwise i loose files that i ill no longer have possibility to recover…as it looks like. i bought my passport 500gb about 2 months ago…less usage…just work data.
why exactly the same problem has occurred with me, i have tried all the recovery softwares possible (in my budget), and also enquired my local drive recovery expert (who is asking a hefty sum of money, i personally feel the problem is in the hardware of the drive which must be causing sudden disconnection of the drive (in most of the cases its the firewire port / cable). It seems like a total waste of money and precious data. Really need to get the things back.
My drive works and continues to spin however it can not be seen on my mac and i dont know what to do, it happened after i updated the most recent firmware, i am really annoyed!!!
