I have a Passport Elite 320 Gb running on a HP a6120n Vista machine. I noticed no activity on it for a few days. Then WDDM is not running came up, although in Task Manager WD SmartWare has been running. When I brought up SmartWare on the task bar, System (my computer) information shows, but nothing else. When I try to click on Update Software, Contact us, or anything else, MS Word opens with some html code. I can’t do anything else. I saw a post on answers.microsoft to uninstall the software, so I did in Control Panel -the only place I could do it. They say reinstall the software…how to do that?
Is there any way I can use this as a regular external hard drive now - to be able to see what’s actually on there and transfer files back and forth? I’ve had it for three years so it has a lotta stuff on it .
I checked it out on my XP machine and Windows Explorer saw it - as a virtual drive - I’m not sure what that’s all about. So I hooked it back up to this un and Windows installed the software this time. In Windows Esplorer on XP and this machine says 0 bytes free of 644 MB. This is a 320 GB drive.
So now it wants me to set up everything again, like it’s a new drive and I just installed it. I don’t understand what’s going on here.
When I first got it, I asked a WD tech if I can just use it as an external drive. But the way it’s set up…I can’t see the files that are on it, I can’t put what I want on it, I can’t transfer to another computer any specific files if I hook it up to that. It seems it’s extremely limited to WD’s parameters.
After all this, I think I have it set up again, but it looks like there’s nothing on the drive. How can this be when I’ve backed up nearly 140 GB in the last two years.
I spent the last two hours backing it all up…again. What’s to guarantee that all my data will not disappear again without any notice whatsoever?
