WD passport not showing up in explorer

[RanchoBurger]

It does show up in computer management but all options are grayed out except for "delete volume" and "help". I use it for media storage and usually keep it plugged into my Xbox One for watching movies. Haven't used it in a couple months. It's also not showing up when plugged into the Xbox or my other laptop. Anyone have any ideas? I've enclosed an image from computer management. It shouldn't show those three sections as unallocated, should it? Also, when I chose to eject drives, it does show up as "eject elements 1023", so I know windows is at least kind of recognizing it. And I've tried reinstalling the driver.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Welcome to the TH Community, @RanchoBurger!

It looks like your WD My Passport has 2 unallocated partitions, meaning that these capacity are not accessible or used, you can basically make that space available by formatting the volumes. As to why you are unable to access those files on the 259.79 GB partition is most probably because you have somehow lost the drive letter & path. Refer to the hyperlink to our knowledge base, where you will find the tutorials on how to change the drive letter assignment & paths in Windows and how to format & partition your hard drive.

Hope this helps you. Let me know if you face any further issues.
SuperSoph_WD

 

[RanchoBurger]

Thank you for the response, Soph. I'm unable to change or add a drive letter in disk management and formatting will wipe the contents of the drive, correct? Was hoping there was some solution to this that didn't involve losing my data.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there again, @RanchoBurger!

Well, not having that option does sound unfortunate. 🙁 Assigning or changing the drive letter on an external drive shouldn't affect the data on it. Formatting, on the other hand, does, so be careful! Those unallocated partitions do not contain anything. However, I'd strongly recommend you try to access the contents on your WD My Passport from another computer as well and see how it will get recognized there. Another thing that could help is uninstalling & reinstalling the external as a device from Device Manager in Windows.
If you manage to access your files, back them immediately elsewhere and then re-format the WD My Passport through the Disk Management. Have you also tried using a different USB cable with it?

In the future, always make sure you backup your files to at least one more locations. Remember that moving data from your system drive to an external hard drive is not a backup, unless there is already a duplicate of the file on a different drive!

Let me know if you have more questions & keep me posted with the troubleshooting!
SuperSoph_WD