I have a 120GB Western Digital Passport external hard drive and it will not open up on my pc. the WD passport will turn ''on'' and light up and the pc will detect that a usb is plugged in but it will not appear as one of the hard drives or ''local disk'' on ''MY COMPUTER''. It will begin to make a humming and spinning sound on and off. i tried using another usb cable plug and still nothing. i tried using another pc and still nothing. I can't open up my WD passport to get to important files. Please help me.

Sounds like your passport is not working anymore. The fact that it wont work on another computer is a solid sign that something has failed in the device itself. Its possible that both of your comptuers have USB 1.1 but I would think this is unlikely.

I would plug it in to one of the comptuers, then go into your administrator tools then open your computer management tool(start>control panel> administrator tools> computer management). This will allow you to see if windows is detecting the drive at all. Sometimes if the file directory is corrupt, or the hard drive is even partially damaged, then it will not show up under "my computer" but it might show up under your computer management tool. If you see it on there, then there is probably something wrong with the hard drive that is not allowing the computer to recognize the device, or at least install it properly. If you dont have any crucial data, you can just simply reformat the drive and it might start to work after that. If you do, then you might have to take the thing apart and transfer the data by using the hard drive like it was just another drive on the computer.

If your computer does not detect the drive at all, not even on comptuer management, then I suspect the drive, or at least the adapter part of it is not working, in which case, you will need to remove the drive from the casing and use it as if it was another internal drive, you might be able to reformat it, then put it back in its casing, and hope that it works after that, but I have never taken a WD passport apart before, so I would recommend doing a google search to see if anyone else has done this before.

FYI, when I bought my WD passport, I bought a replacement plan with staples beucase I knew that with all the traveling I did, I would eventually break it. I have dropped it about 3-4 times only after about 4 months, the thing still works without any problems, but that just goes to show how well WD builds their drives, however, I am sure that if I wasn't so lucky, that I would be calling them up right now asking for a new one.