Hi,

I have a Western digital ‘WD My Passport’ external usb harddisk and it has become defective in some way.

When I connect it to windows I’ve managed to get access to it before, but it was really sluggush to navigate in and it would fail to open certain folders and files. Now I cannot get windows to recognize it al all. It powers on and windows says something like ‘setting up deveice’, but nothing more happens.

If I open windows ‘disk management’ the drive shows up as ‘Disk 1’, ‘Unknown’, ‘Not initialized’.

I wes reccomended a tool called Recuva (https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva), but since windows doesn’t recognize the disk I cannot tell the tool where to look for files to recover.

I’ve also tried a tool called TestDisk (https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download), but it doesn’t see the drive.

Can anyone help please? :)

Thanks

  • thericofactor
    3·
    21 days ago

    I had one if these not work because the usb port it was connected to didn’t provide enough power. Try connecting it to an externality powered USB hub if you can.

    If it’s really broken I would open it up and connect it directly to an SATA port. If I remember correctly, inside is just a USB to SATA converter and a pretty standard drive.