I have a 500GB WD passport that my computers will not recognize.
The drive's light comes on and it appears to spin up when plugged in.
I get the beep from Windows letting me know a device has been pluged
in but no device shows that I can access.
I ran Western Digital Data Lifeguard and it found the disk with NO
PROBLEM, ran the tests it does ((I just did the basic)), and resulted
everything as PASSED.
But still my computer faills to recognize the WD Passport hard drive
when I plug it in.
Does anone have any suggestions on fixing this problem - other then
getting a new external hard drive? I appreciate any helpful advice or
suggestions.
Thanks
B. Mast
Type "diskmgmt.msc" in the Start menu area, to run the Disk Management application.
In WinXP, it would be Start:Run, then enter the program name. In Windows 7,
you enter the program name in the start area, right click on the name when the
"search" phase is finished, then select "Run as Administrator" from the
right-click popup menu. As far as I know, you have to run it as Administrator
in Windows 7, to gain access to everything.
In this example, "Disk 2" shows as "60GB unallocated". That might have been a
brand new disk the user plugged into his computer. You'd right click in there
and create a new partition, to set up a file system and define some space for
yourself. If no storage space has been defined yet, Disk Management is where
you want to go.
http://i.technet.microsoft.com/Dd163558.figure_C19625051_1(en-us,TechNet.10).png
If your disk is showing as "unallocated" and yet you know there is valuable data
on there which is lost, then *don't* do anything to it in Disk Management! Disk
Management is for dealing with a brand new empty disk that isn't showing up yet,
and you want to add its first partition.
*******
To try to recover a disk that lost the partitions because of a damaged MBR
(master boot record), you can try TestDisk. It takes some practice to use this,
and every time I sit in front of this, my eyes glaze over. But, it's free...
It will scan the disk, looking for lost partitions, then propose a new
MBR table. Don't accept the new computed MBR table, unless you know it to be
correct. For example, if you know there is a single 240GB partition lost on
the hard drive, and TestDisk says it sees a 120GB, and two 60GB partitions,
then you know TestDisk is full of crap. Don't Save the computed MBR unless
it is absolutely perfect for the job. That's the hardest part of using
TestDisk, is trusting the answer it gives. If at any time you are
uncomfortable with the prompt offered in TestDisk, you can stop it
by pressing control-C. (Even the Windows version accepts that as input.)
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step
*******
The command line equivalent to Disk Management is the "diskpart" program,
which allows very surgical operations to be carried out. First you have to
define which disk and which partition you want to work on. Then issue
a command to carry out the operation. It ends up taking maybe
six lines of typed in stuff, to do what you do easily with the GUI in
the Disk Management window.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490893.aspx
The trick to using that program, is finding a nice tutorial page with
short scripts that select the drive, do an operation on it, and so on.
With examples to stare at, it's easy to use.
Paul
