Note however that some external drives don't use standards and may have modified the HDD port itself as the enclosure port rather than have the SATA plug into an enclosure port. Depending on your enclosure, you could possibly recover things by popping open the enclosure and then plugging the drive into your machine directly using a SATA to USB cable/eSATA cable or even straight onto the mobo with a SATA cable. If Testdisk is also unable to find it, it could be a controller failure in the enclosure. It can also recover the files directly to a directory of your choice if it see's the missing partition and you'd rather grab the information first before attempting a partition recovery. This can recover lost filesystems if the MFT is badly corrupted. If you think the partition is lost you could try Testdisk. You could also try the open command from the right click contextual menu as this sometimes bypasses the autorun and opens it directly in explorer. It's odd that it's looking for a program on access if it isn't encrypted in some way. Try right clicking D and see what options you have in the contextual menu. So that is my first reddit post, thank you for taking the time to read. I have included pictures below to show the steps that I have taken as mentioned above. I have looked in to sending it off for recovery however this is very expensive so will be last choice.
I downloaded some data recovery software but this hasn't helped as the HDD is not recognized by it.Īny insight into the issue or help on how to resolve it would be amazing, I am not overly tech savvy but would like to explore my options. There is no unusual clicking and the HDD boots and the led lights up. I then opened up disk manager and the hard-drive shows as unknown/not initialized, the device manager asked me to initialize but fails due to a "Fatal hardware error" making me second guess whether the duplicate remover tool is at fault or if the hard drive is damaged.
My PC recognizes the external hard drive when I go to eject hardware but in devices and hardware it shows as "CD Drive", when I click on it I receive the "application not found" error message.
My device was password protected, not sure if that may play a part in this? Hope this solves your issue and you are more careful with passphrases from now on.I have ran in to an issue with my WD My Passport external hard drive not working and am hoping for some guidance on how to potentially resolve the issue.įor some context, I have been gathering pictures from multiple devices on to my hard drive, I then used a duplicate remover tool to de-clutter the files so that I can easily organize them in to separate albums etc however my PC is no longer abale to access the device and I am wondering is some deleted files have caused this. The time taken will raise exponentially with the increase in each alphabet or special character.
PASSPHRASES made in this manner are difficult to crack with brute force attacks or with any other password cracking option available as on date. Now, let us assume that 88 is your year of birth. Next time when you select a password.think about a word. It is really hard to lose all your valuable data just because you dont remember a silly password.
After you have formatted the Hard Disk, you can start dumping whatever data it is that you find crucial again into your freshly reformatted WD Passport. Once you use the Erase Tool, whatever data that was there in the HDD till now will be gone forever.
One can reformat the hard disk with the Erase option available in the WD Unlock Tool. The reason is that there is hardware level encryption in the WD Passport.The Only solution left is that you will have to forget about what was there in the hard disk if you forgot your password and start afresh. Not even the customer care can offer a solution. The WD Security password protection is a 256-bit AES encryption system. The problem with WD Password is that you cannot retrieve the password once it is forgotten. If you had used a password to secure your WD Password, you did it probably because you didnt want anyone else to see the contents which you had stored inside the WD Passport External HDD.