WD My Passport Ultra 1TB-cannot access

[mek501st]

Dear all,
I have read the many threads on this forum but so far I have not found one that describes my problem.
My WD Passport has always displayed on windows as drive G. Just today it has changed to letter I when I connect my drive to my PC. It shows up on this pic but when I try to open it, it displays that the location is not available. I tried uninstalling the drivers using device manager and this does not solve the problem. I used disk manager tool and it displays my drive as RAW. But when I open CMD and run checkdisk, it detects that my disk is NTFS and has no problems with it. Oh and the drive works on my mac (mac detected it as NTFS - read only). Are there any other solutions apart from formatting the drive?

Thanks,
Pijak

EDIT: I tried reassigning a different drive letter on disk manager - does not solve the problem.
EDIT: I am using windows 10

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there mek501st,

Sorry that you are facing some issues with your WD drive.
Can you transfer the data to your mac? In case you can do that, please do back up your data.

After that, you can attach the drive back to your Win computer and try to run some RAW data recovery software: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/278914-32-recover-drive-format

Once you've done that, you can test the drive with WD's DLG tool and check its health status out. You can run both short and extended tests: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=c8E22j

Let me know how this goes,
D_Know_WD

 

[mek501st]

Hi there mek501st,

Sorry that you are facing some issues with your WD drive.
Can you transfer the data to your mac? In case you can do that, please do back up your data.

After that, you can attach the drive back to your Win computer and try to run some RAW data recovery software: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/278914-32-recover-drive-format

Once you've done that, you can test the drive with WD's DLG tool and check its health status out. You can run both short and extended tests: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=c8E22j

Let me know how this goes,
D_Know_WD

Hey D_Know_WD

Thank you for your answer.
I did transfer my data to my mac which backed up everything.

Surprisingly the RAW data recovery could not detect all my files (i used easus).
I used WD's tool and everything worked out fine.

I also tried a different cable.

What bothers me was why both chkdsk and my mac could detect the drive as NTFS (in the case of the mac open everything and copy the files) but was recognised as RAW on windows. I did try my other drives and windows seem to be able to open them....

My drive is still under warranty... Would you suggest me to send it in under warranty? Do WD recover the data for us if I send it in this way?

Thanks

 

[mek501st]

Update: I tried connecting my drive to my office PC running windows 8. The drive was detected as NTFS and runs as normal....
Now I have isolated the problem to my PC. Any ideas on fixing this?

 

[D_Know_WD]

Since you've done quite a lot of things, I believe it will not hurt to test it with some third party tools as well: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/282651-32-best-diagnostic-testing-utility

Apart from that, as the drive is recognized by another system, you can:
- Go to your MOBO's website and update your drivers.(in case they are no up to date - take a look at the USB 3.0 ones if there are some).
- Go to Device Manager -> right click and uninstall the drive -> plug out the drive -> reboot system -> Plug it back in.
- What happens when you try to change the drive letter? Try to assign drive letter different from G: (like K, L, etc)

As for the RMA process, in case you decide to go with that, you will not get another drive with your data inside.

Let me know how this goes,
D_Know_WD

 

[mek501st]

So i have found a solution!
It seems that the latest windows 10 build (anniversary update) caused the issue.
Others seem to have the same problems. http://www.tenforums.com/drivers-hardware/58573-windows-10-anniversary-update-problems-not-recognizing-external-hdd.html
Solution: Go back to previous windows build.