Question WD My Passport External SSD doesn't appear in "This PC" ?

[Beachhead1985]

Not sure what or why, but it probably had to do with being connected to my laptop when it died. I plugged it into my PC to try and back up the data and it shows under "Safely remove and eject hardware", but not in My PC. Tried restarting. No good.

PC Specs
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-F2A78M-D3H
CPU: AMD A6-6400K APU with Radeon iGPU
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super
RAM: 32GB
Windows 10

Thanks for your time.

 

[evermorex76]

Look in Disk Management and see if there is anything. If not then there may have been some corruption of the partition table or file table. If there is a partition with no drive letter, right-click and see if you can assign a drive letter. Absolutely don't try anything else so you don't make it worse. If none of that is working, you can try free or paid recovery software which can scan the drive to try to restore the partition structure or locate undamaged files that can be copied to another location. After you have the files saved, you can repartition and reformat the drive. It probably wasn't physically damaged unless there was a power surge, and the fact that it is at least detected by the other computer would seem to indicate it's functional. There's no repeated clicking or anything, is there?

 

[Beachhead1985]

It shows up in disk manager, kind-of. But it's acting like it's never been used before.

Funny thing? Hooked it up to my GF's laptop last night and I was able to transfer all my data. Today, in disk management it wanted to be redone as MBR or GPT and is showing as TWO extant unallocated partitions with the SAME name. Disk 5 and Disk 5.

It's not making any noises. it is an SSD, so it shouldn't correct?

 

[evermorex76]

The partitions say Disk 5 and Disk 5? You don't mean it's showing two DISKS with that number? Both of those would be really weird but usually partitions wouldn't have a name unless the user named them when they were formatted (and Windows has never to my knowledge labelled partitions as "disk" anything, and of course it wouldn't have two of them if you didn't make them. It would be slightly less weird for Windows to have flaked in some way when a bad drive was plugged in and not updated Disk Management properly when it was unplugged then plugged in again.

You didn't mention the size of the SSD (and yeah I missed the fact that it was an SSD so no noises).

I'd be considering this a failing drive, with a very strange failure mode if it's visible on one machine but not another, and asking to be initialized when you plug it in to one of them. I just really can't imagine what could be making it act that way.

 

[Beachhead1985]

The partitions say Disk 5 and Disk 5? You don't mean it's showing two DISKS with that number? Both of those would be really weird but usually partitions wouldn't have a name unless the user named them when they were formatted (and Windows has never to my knowledge labelled partitions as "disk" anything, and of course it wouldn't have two of them if you didn't make them. It would be slightly less weird for Windows to have flaked in some way when a bad drive was plugged in and not updated Disk Management properly when it was unplugged then plugged in again.

You didn't mention the size of the SSD (and yeah I missed the fact that it was an SSD so no noises).

I'd be considering this a failing drive, with a very strange failure mode if it's visible on one machine but not another, and asking to be initialized when you plug it in to one of them. I just really can't imagine what could be making it act that way.

Sorry, I meant two Discs, both named disk 5.

It's a 4TB.

And yeah; I get weird issues.