Good Morning - I have WD Elements Desktop (1TB) WDBAAU0010HBK USB 2.0 on Windows 10 OS.
I have had this unit for 5 years now and it has always worked perfectly. I use it as primary storage for all my photographs, currently around 800Gb worth.
On 20th March, I was using the hard drive perfectly normally. When I closed down my PC at night, a Windows Update was waiting to install. I selected the download and switch off option. next morning on starting the PC, the Win update installed. When completed and PC restarted, I had lost connectivity to my WD Elements drive (This had been Local Disc ‘D’ on my PC)
My PC is 1 year old and has backward-compatible USB 3 ports which have worked just fine with my USB 2 Elements yet there is a suggestion that the USB incompatibility might be an issue since this Win Update. Other messages suggest that I need to format my WD in order for it to work. If I do this, I will lose all the data stored on it. Luckily, I have a remote cloud back-up as well, but I really want to recover the data on the disc.
Please can you tell me:
(A) Is it possible that a Windows Update could remove/alter drivers or affect the compatibility or connectivity between my PC and the WD Elements?
(B) Is there anything I can try to get my PC to recognize the Elements drive without formatting it?
Where can I go from here?
Any help or suggestions would be most appreciated. Thank you.
Hi,
I suggest you search MicroSoft updates or the Internet for similar problems. Do not format the drive!
MY last MS Windows 10 update wiped out my Mouse! Three of them would not work on either a desktop or a laptop. I was able to use the laptop keyboard tracker to search the internet and found several references to the problem. And MS was aware! One reference suggested removing the the portion of the update that concerned a patch for Logitech Mice. That worked. Later MS came out with a revised update and fixed the problem.
Hang in there!
Cliff
Thank you Clifford for your reply. I have done as you suggest and can find many references to similar problems on both MS and WD community sites but they all refer to 2016/2017 - nothing recent. It worries me that MS are probably killing external hard drives every day but don’t seem to care. I need to find someone with a Win 7 system and try my hard drive in that.
Ok, it just got worse - having discovered Disc Management, it seems that Windows is reading the External disc as a RAW file system, rather than NTFS. So it looks like I can only get my PC to read this disc again if I reformat it thereby losing 15 years and 850Gb worth of photographs - and all down to a Microsoft Windows update.
Other external hard drive users beware - this is a real problem and is not WD specific; you can find reports of this concerning many of the big names in External hard drives. Microsoft should compensate for the loss of data.
Hi,
Did you find the specific update that caused the trouble? If you find that, you should be able to uninstall it and restore your system. To remove the update:
1: Open Control Panel > Programs and Features. Click on “View installed updates” on the left.
2. Search through the list for an update on the date you did them and something that fits your problem.
3. Select it and click on Uninstall. It may take a while.
Cliff
Good Morning Clifford, I fear the damage is already done and permanent, so removing the update that caused this is not going to change the RAW status of the disc, It needs to be re-formatted to work again with a resultant loss of data. Yesterday I took my WD external drive to a friend who still has Windows 7 on his laptop - and thus does not have the Win 10 Creators update that has caused the problem, Unfortunately, even though his laptop downloaded all the drivers etc and recognized the disc etc, it STILL said that it needed formatting to work. So it looks like the damage is irreversible.
I am about 75% through downloading my data from my cloud back-up so when that has completed satisfactorily, I will then reformat the WD and reload it with my temporary backup download folder.
Hopefully, I will not need to use the services of a data extraction company, but I will wait before formatting it just to make sure everything has downloaded from the cloud.
Thank you, Clifford, for taking an interest.
