WD Passport Drive Recognized, but Lights keep blinking and does not stay stable. Drive not initialized, Read only and offline.

[Shabbir_kanch]

I have a WD My Passport 1 tb drive. I am facing a very wierd problem. My drive gets detected as i get the USB sign in my task bar. However it takes a lot of time to be shown in Disk management. When it does, everytime i plug in, it gives me a new error. Sometimes it says "Drive not Initialized", sometime drive become "Readonly and format is RAW" and sometime the drive is "offline".

I have faced an issue earlier as well where my drive did not mount. It gave me Drive not Initialized error. I had used Diskpart to make the drive offline and then back online and it worked at that time.

Now, I have been facing the same issue, however the lights on the drive just keeps blinking and therefore it does not allow Diskpart to function properly. Light stops for a bit only to allow diskpart to detect and list it (using list disk). Now I have tried most of the CMD methods Like:

1. Attr disk clear (to clear write protection)
2. Assgn or format
3. Convert gpt

All of these just does not work because the light keeps flashing and disk does not stay stable.

I have changed ports, I have changed computers, I have changed data cable to see if anything can work. But it has not.

I have read so many blogs and articles but i am unable to find a solution. I really need the data and my disk to work 🙁

Please can anyone help me out?

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there Shabbir_kanch,

That is really unpleasant. 🙁

Taking into consideration all the things you've tried, it seems that there is something wrong with the enclosure or the HDD itself. In both cases, your safet bet for recovering the data would be to contact a data recovery company. You can check WD's Data Recovery Partners out: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=Prp5sX

Apart from that, if the drive gets recognized by Disk Management after some time, my suggestion would be to wait for it to get recognized and try to access it with some data recovery tool.
Threads on that:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/280932-32-hard-drive-recovery

Is the drive under warranty? In case it is, I believe you should be able to RMA the drive. You can just contact the place you got it from.

It's not like it matters in that case, as you weren't able to access the drive, but you need to keep i mind that some of the CMD commands that you've used could be data destructive.(format, convert, etc.)

Let me know in case you have some more qeustions,
D_Know_WD

 

[Shabbir_kanch]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. No, unfortunately the disk is not under warranty. I bought it 3 years ago and the warranty has expired by now. The drive does get recognized by Disk Management, however it tends to hang my system when i try to access it using DiskPart utility from CMD.

Now i will wait for it to recognize and then access it via Ease US data recovery tool.

I hope that can do some magic.

Hi there Shabbir_kanch,

That is really unpleasant. 🙁

Taking into consideration all the things you've tried, it seems that there is something wrong with the enclosure or the HDD itself. In both cases, your safet bet for recovering the data would be to contact a data recovery company. You can check WD's Data Recovery Partners out: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=Prp5sX

Apart from that, if the drive gets recognized by Disk Management after some time, my suggestion would be to wait for it to get recognized and try to access it with some data recovery tool.
Threads on that:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/280932-32-hard-drive-recovery

Is the drive under warranty? In case it is, I believe you should be able to RMA the drive. You can just contact the place you got it from.

It's not like it matters in that case, as you weren't able to access the drive, but you need to keep i mind that some of the CMD commands that you've used could be data destructive.(format, convert, etc.)

Let me know in case you have some more qeustions,
D_Know_WD