20 Most Recent Western Digital My Passport Essential 500GB External USB 20 Portable Blue 500 GB Hard Drive Questions & Answers

PLEASE GO TO CONTROL PANEL, CLICK ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS, CLICK COMPUTER MANAGEMENT, ON LEFT PANE, UNDER STORAGE, CLICK DISK MANAGEMENT, WAIT A FEW SECONDS, MAXIMIZE PAGE,THEN SEE IF YOU CAN SEE IT. IF IT SAYS UNALLOCATED SPACE, RIGHT CLICK ,YOU WILL HAVE TO FORMAT USUALLY "NTFS". IF IT DOES NOT SAY UNALLOCATED SPACE, THEN RIGHT CLICK AND MARK PARTITION AS ACTIVE. .........HOPE THIS HELPS........JEFFXC

hi

go to WD site and get drivers for XP downlod and run that then try hopw fully it will work

replace all the leads that attach to your hard drive including electrical extensions + IDE,SATA and the ones that attach from your motherboard to hard drive hope this helps

i wish i knew the answer, i am having the same problem. i have switched ALL of my toshiba computer power settings to no stand-by, no hibernation, no automatic shut down (as this was suggested) and windows xp still turns into a blank screen just a few seconds after plugging this in. hard drive too strong for my 3.5 year old computer? not sure, but this is beyond ridiculous.

The Smart is on verge of showing that the hard disk has plenty of bad sectors, and cannot be trusted for data.A data recovery expert is needed to get data first and If you can clone the patient hard disk to a new donor hard disk , then your NAS will be up and working.I hope there are no head reading issues.

If your WD passport is no longer seen by your desktop or laptop operating system something within the passport has failed. You won't have many options to try to resolve this, as when they fail , it is usually due to age or a component faulure. If you know an honest reliable techy you can ask if they can try to test the device for your or can recover the data from it.

try to change the data cable of HDD.

This program allows you to modify the date (and other metadata) on one or multiple files. http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/bulk_file_changer.html

You can send it in to WD or a company that specializes in data retrieval from dead hard drives and have them copy off the files for you, but it will cost a furtune to do it.

Any Walmart, Best Buy, Target, Computer store, online...etc.

Connect it like usual and see if its working. Better to backup any data you have on that hard drive, to be safe.

These may be helpful for your issue:

You can try this: Fix the problem with Microsoft Windows Update that is not working OR this: You receive 0x8007041D error when you visit the Windows Update Web site

It appears to be ans external hard drive enclosure or something connected with it. You can find the enclosures on ebay - about 10 - 20 USD

Not DIY. Most professionals won't work on this because it requires very advanced knowledge and techniques and is very expensive.

Read only is a file attribute. There is read and modify, and full control. You would have to change the attribute if you have the right permissions (administrator). To change the permissions you would have to right click on the file, go to the security tab on top and change what is allowed.

I suggest you contact WD support with that question - by email I find best, you may also try by telephone (1800-200-5789) http://support.wdc.com/country/country.asp?c=india You will need to 'register' (create an account) https://westerndigital.secure.force.com/?lang=en 13.April.2014