Western Digital drive not recognized by notebook

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for Windows
1

This issue concerns an external hard drive WD Elements - 500GB (P/N: WDBUZG5000ABK-05, S/N: [Deleted-Privacy]).

In principle the specific hard drive works flawlessly with every computer I have used so far under Windows and Linux with one exception:

When I connect the drive at an HP ZBook 15 G3, it spins up normally but apart from that there is now way to detect the hard drive. I have tried using the Windows disk management and the diskpart command.

I faced the same problem when I tried to mount this drive under linux with the same computer. In /dev there was no entry for the disk. I tried running different hardware detection commands and disk management utilities, but again the drive was not detected.

Some other removable media I tried worked fine with this computer. Any ideas? Thanks in advance

2

Have you tried testing if the issue relates to power or USB 3.0 drivers by replacing your unit’s USB Micro 3.0 cable with a standard Micro USB 2.0 cable in order to force legacy mode?

3

Thanks for your prompt reply. I tried it and it worked! You really saved the day! I would never consider trying the USB 2 cables since I expected that a new computer would not have such issues and that USB 3 cables would work without problem.