Wasn't really too sure where to post this, so being a Western Digital Passport 320GB external HDD I've posted it here. Had this now for a year or so I think and have been using it regularly without any problems. A couple of days ago, tried to connect to my PC via the USB and it comes with the message, driver software installation failed... followed by, device has malfunctioned and is not recognised by Windows 7. At a bit of a loss here, tried on an XP machine, same message and with another USB cable. All drivers etc are upto date. Drive is not being recognised by Windows 7 disk manager either. Unfortunately, I was in the process of backing up my media and data so had a few things which were not backed up elsewhere!! So really would like to get to the bottom of this? I fear it may have given up the ghost?! Any ideas? Thanks.
Try getting the HDD out of the case and connecting it to the mobo like a normal HDD, if it works then you know it gubbins in the enclosure that are borked. If it doesn't then it's probably the HDD itself.
I had a similar issue brought to me last year and I'm sorry to say I was unable to fix it. In my case Windows was reporting that the drive had malfunctioned. This was the case regardless of the machine or OS to which it was connected. I tried removing the drive from its caddy and connecting directly to a motherboard, but unfortunately for the owner of the drive this too proved fruitless: the drive was dead and I was unable to salvage data (there were no signs of life at all). I can only suggest that you try the same thing in the hope that your drive is still functional and that the issue is with its caddy. Good luck.
Cheers for the responses guys. Checked online warranty and its still under warranty, that's something at least. Do WD tend to ask for the drives etc or will it be ok opening the caddy up? Nothing too valuable that can't be replaced. Unfortunately my entire 150GB music collection will be the hardest thing to replace me thinks. Oh well you live and you learn
I don't know whether or not WD would require you to return the drive for a replacement or not, check your warranty or email them to confirm that. In my experience though most companies check serial numbers and stuff with you via email and then just send out a replacement without requiring the defective product to be returned, unless they wish to attempt a repair.
Despite Western digital making fantastic HDD's. Their W.D Book are garbage. Not the HDD inside.. the SATA controller. When I was working on retail as summer jobs, we got so many of these. Those who were out of warranty, we opened it up, and pull the HDD for the customer, ready to be installed in there system, or put an a new enclosure. Of course, you have the whole service fee that links to it to enclosure installation or PC installation. The best external storage solution, is a good old eSATA/USB enclosure, with your own HDD. Max performance (over eSATA) and never fails like that.
Right, so haven spoken to a chap from WD technical support who didn't really offer any solutions he recommended that I RMA my drive. This would require me to ship my drive back to them and lose my data. Before doing that I took the drive apart (carefully) and removed the USB interface and rebooted my machine with the drive connected by the SATA interface...and hey presto drive is recognized and I have my data!! So just in the process of backing it up and erasing then will return the drive for a new one! Many thanks. ...Now I have my music collection back!!
Not something out of the ordinary really. I had this happen with a Lacie external. Never bothered to send it off though. Glad you got it sorted.
I have been having the same issue with a Mybook World edition 1TB (blue circles model, not white bar). Popped the drive into my PC and hooked up up directly and although I can see the drive in the BIOS and in hardware devices, I cannot access anything at all on there. We were using this as backup for my wife's writing and websites mainly but, due to some issues with her laptop we have lost her master copies and unless I can get at the data on the WD drive she has lost 3 books in progress and all her website stuff. Any thoughts? Would another WD enclosure (S/H blue rings one of course) be able to work with this drive without scrubbing it first?
Try downloading drivers from the website, you never know the ones on disc may be corrupted it has happened to me plenty of times and the solution has been downloading from another source.
I have really a very bad experience with WD HDD. And I very upset to know that my laptop have the same hard drive. WD HDD crashed very fast as of my personal experience. Being a desktop support engineer for more then 5 year, i have found that WD Hard drives got crashed then of other.
At work, we have pretty much exclusively on 99% of our systems (this is what Dell and Lenovo uses), Western Digital, and they never let us down. I would be lying if not 1 single one of them failed. We had a few..., but only a few, and all them that failed, was because the computer fans stop working properly due that the computer was running 24/7 for the last 4-5 years, and the HDD was burning hot, due to lack of air flow (we have small factor computers). So basically they failed due to overheating.
