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General discussion

Cannot initialize WD Passport after possibly dropping it

Aug 19, 2009 1:36AM PDT

Afternoon all,

I've been trawling forums for a while now and not really found a solid answer. I think I dropped my WD Passport, it was about a week ago and I was running around at work, and since then I can't get the drive to be recognised fully.

Setup
ACER 6950 Laptop - Vista HP SP1

Symptoms
Under disk management, Vista can find a drive it calls Drive 1, Unknown, at first when I tried to reinitialize it said cannot find the sector requested, now I just get improper function error
Not very scientific but I get the bing bong tones when it's plugged in and there is a drive to "safely remove".
It sometimes appears under disks in device manager and a USB mass storage device under USB
I can also change the drive from performance to quick remove in the device properties

Solutions I've tried
Lying it on various sides, apparently that was a fix elsewhere
Different USB cables, though no new ones but the symptons are the same and I can't believe that 3 cables would all have the same problem

Any help or forum pointer would be amazing. I'm currently volunteering in Tanzania with no local expertises, slow internet connection and limited funds, but I need to get some important research papers off the drive and am considering paying for data recovery.

Lesson learned not to leave important docs on drives.

Cheers in anticipation.
Trying all of the above on XP desktops

Discussion is locked

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Then the last ideas.
Aug 19, 2009 3:49AM PDT

Beyond what's in this forum's top post about this you remove the drive from the case, place in a new case and hope. I won't duplicate the forum sticky contents here and for each new post.

Then off to http://www.drivesavers.com
Bob

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WD PASSPORT FIX
Jul 14, 2010 9:34AM PDT

remove the plastic casing. peel the foil back. slowly remove the "usb card front section" from the "hard drive section".

purchase a "FREE AGENT GOFLEX UPGRADE CABLE - USB 3.0...MADE BY SEAGATE" (about $20 at BestBuy). plug it ino the hard drive section, plug the other end into you computer & it's FIXED!

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End-user fixes
Jul 15, 2010 1:57AM PDT

You MUST clearly understand upon any drop damage, you have "physical damage" to contend with. Its not just some s/w corruption or glitch, true physical h/w is more likely at fault here. The other posters offered fixes but it still depnds on the HD itself has any chance of recovery. I include damage to the ext. case, its ports and/or electronics. Once you swap the HD itself to another ext. USB case, that's your LAST CHANCE as a end-user fix. If it does work then, then contact the pros to do this. Also, let's be clear as well, ALL ATTEMPTS at getting any data recovery under physical damaged condition may further corrupt or cause data damage beyond what was initially incurred. So don't proceed until you have some ext. case or kit to try it on. Don't be mislead into voodoo fixes as these can only further damage the ext. HD more, which is why I posted.

good luck -----Willy Happy