As a matter of fact, the 'external hard drive not showing up' issue can be caused by various reasons, including dead USB ports, driver issues in Windows, using the wrong file system, and so on. Thus, the solutions are varied. Now, keep reading to find how to fix external hard drive not recognized.
I have a Western Digital My Passport 1TB USB3 that is readable from a laptop, but would not appear as a drive on my PC that runs Windows 7 64bit. I fixed the problem by reinstalling the driver for the drive with the following steps:.
Open control panel, view devices and printers, find the drive (mine is labeled 'My Passport 0730'). Open properties of the drive, go to hardware tab, it will show 3 items in 'device functions'. Open the properties of the item with type 'disk drives', press 'change settings'. Go to 'driver' tab, press 'uninstall' to uninstall the driver.
Unplug the drive, plug it back. Windows will behave like the drive is plugged for the first time and install the driver for it After those steps, I can read the drive normally. This seems to be an odd issue with WD My Passport drives. For some reason, the USB registration of the WD Drive gets messed up. It happens to me every couple months with mine on Windows 7 64bit.
Here's how I fix it:. Unplug the drive from the computer. Open a command prompt as Administrator. Type the following commands:. set devmgrshownonpresentdevices=1. devmgmt.msc.
In the Device Manager:. Click View. Select Show Hidden Devices.
Expand the Disk Drives section. Right-click any 'WD My Passport' entries and select Uninstall. Expand your Universal Serial Bus controllers section. Right-click any entries here that are a light-grey icon and select Uninstall. Reconnect the WD My Passport drive and it should reappear as an available drive in Windows Explorer.
3 days ago my passport 500gb is not recognized by my computer. We’re all in the same boat. Firmware + Software is up to date. Was installed correctly.
Drive shows up in “Device Manager” Drive shows up in WDSmartWare, however it’s permanently - Drive discovering. Inside the WDSmartWare, “No Writable WD SmartWare Partition Found” It’s being detected by the green plug of windows showing you have something plugged into the USB-hubs. I’ve ran scans to see if the drive is broken, corrupted or any problems.
There are none, perfectly intact with the original cable which is not damaged either. Made sure it’s a Windows My Passport and has worked before and it stopped once I updated the firmware and software. Does not show up in My Computer yet it’s clearly that it’s detected but just won’t register. It does show up in “My Computer”, “Manage” and under the “Disk Management”, it’s online but not accessible. Dear community, help us since that’s what a community is for. Sorry, I wasn’t sure what you meant by “scan”. If you were able to perform a surface scan via a software application, then obviously the drive isn’t password protected.
However, if you used Data LifeGuard to perform an internal self test, then AFAICS this test would proceed whether or not the drive were password protected. At this point I would use a disc editor to examine sectors 0 (MBR) and 63 (boot sector). If you can see these, then this would suggest that your drive may have a logical problem. Otherwise, if you can’t access these sectors, then I’d suspect a hardware fault. I have the same problem. I have a 500gb My Passport (supportinh both USB2 and 3).
The disk worls properly, keeping showing data stored on several PCs who runs Windows XP and one who runs W7, but in both my PC (W7 32bit) and laptop (Dell N4030 with W7 64bit) appears briefly on Computer Management -Storage- Disk Management, allegedly unformatted, and every minute a “You need to format the disk” appears, but, even when I go to disk option, the system is unable to format the disk. The unique path I didn’t try is to reformat any of my computers. I just signed up today for this forum for the same reason, its sad that WD reps aren’t on here to lend support. I replied on another thread about this problem, but here is a possible fix for some. When I plug my passport in to my PS3, it is still recognized and accessible.
You can access you files from there and move them to another storage device and then re-format the passport. This didn’t work for me because I didn’t have another storage device large enough to store 400 gigs of info. I’m pretty pisssed considering I didn’t drop my drive.
My problems started after I downloaded a movie to my HD. Hopefully we can find a fix.