WD My Passport portable hard drive not recognised

buyitall

Hi,
I have a WD 250GB portable harddrive which I bought last October from play.com. It's been working fine until now and I have a lot of photos, videos and work stuff on there. However, since this morning it has not been recognised by Windows so I am unable to access any of the files. :mad:
I have tried it on 3 different laptops in several usb ports.When plugged in, it initially makes a whirring and faint beeping noise 5 times, then nothing. The little white light remains on when it's plugged in, but does not flash. I have searched for solutions, and tried various suggestions to try to find the device on my computer, but it is just not recognised. I have also tried using a different wire to connect the drive to the usb port.
Most things other than the work-related folders are backed up elsewhere - the work stuff will be mighty inconvenient if I lose it, but I am not prepared to spend a lot on data recovery for it.
Is there any hope? Many thanks for any advice x

fwor

My personal experience of external HDD's is that the USB interface circuitry is not very reliable - I've come across several now that just stop working.

If that's what has happened, your data is probably still perfectly Ok. You should simply be able to dismantle the casing, remove the drive and put it in another caddy. You will need to work out what physical size and type of drive you have (there are only 4 combinations there) and a replacement caddy will probably be about £15.

Once you've got your data off it, you can put the HDD back in the broken caddy and send it back to Play.com for a replacement, though I would DBAN it first in that case.

Of course there is a relatively small chance that the HDD itself has failed, but - unless it's been dropped - that's unlikely for one so recent.

buyitall

Thanks for the response. It definitely hasn't been dropped since the last time it was working normally, although I have been carrying it around in my handbag and rummaging around in the bag without taking special notice of the hard drive. Didn't realise they were so fragile.

AHAR

Someone at work came to me with one of those. I can't remember the symptoms or even if the drive itself worked with another USB caddy. The main thing I remember is that it was a bit of a pig to get into - I couldn't manage it without breaking some of the plastic clips that hold it together.

davb

fwor wrote: »

You should simply be able to dismantle the casing, remove the drive and put it in another caddy. You will need to work out what physical size and type of drive you have (there are only 4 combinations there) and a replacement caddy will probably be about £15.

I'm not trying to put you off as it's worth a try, but possibly not, as I think some of the newer WD Passport drives are the ultra-portable ones, which are squeezed into as small a case as possible - and I believe have an integrated USB controller on the drive, and not the traditional SATA/IDE plugged into a USB converter. They also have a firmware controlled security type partition like a U3 flash drive.