my western digital mypassport was working fine now when i connect it, it tells me it needs to be formatted in order for me to use. I initially did not want to format it because there is a lot of data on it that I need. I read in another forum that there is a program(filescavenger) i can you to recover my files if i formatted the drive. I clicked format but now the drive does not want to format. I tried doing chkdsk but it gives me a 'Cannot open volume for direct access' error. also the file system type is RAW under computer management is it suppose to be this way? can someone please help me with this problem. I have some very important files on this drive an would like to access them. I can access the drive on my smart tv with no problem but it does not show up on my laptop with xp an on my win 7 it tells me it needs to format pelase help!
WD external hard drive not showing up
- Thread starter Kerie
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neil_g
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right so lets get this straight..
works fine on the tv.
on the xp laptop it does not display at all, no error messages?
on the win 7 machine it displays the format message.
first things first plug it back in to the xp machine, go into disk management. does it show there? if so what file system type (fat/ntfs/raw)? does it have a drive letter?
how old is the drive? any knocks or drops at all? do you have access to a desktop that if necessary you could open the my passport up and get the drive out, then connect it inside the computer?
works fine on the tv.
on the xp laptop it does not display at all, no error messages?
on the win 7 machine it displays the format message.
first things first plug it back in to the xp machine, go into disk management. does it show there? if so what file system type (fat/ntfs/raw)? does it have a drive letter?
how old is the drive? any knocks or drops at all? do you have access to a desktop that if necessary you could open the my passport up and get the drive out, then connect it inside the computer?
the drive is about a year old it did drop a while back but it was working fine for months after that. when i plug it into my xp machine it causes it to freeze it does not let me open disk management and when i disconnect it is pops up right away. when it show up as file system raw on my win7 machine and i have no desktop
i did that last night around 7pm and it 10am the next day and its still runinng. it says insufficient disk space to hotfix unreadable file 56460 and its still counting. Does this sound right? should i still wait and let it finish or should i just stop it.
neil_g
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sounds knackered to be honest. but let it run through, to disconnect it now may cause even more harm.
I use the same cable on the tv as the computer and i've been switching usb ports it still doesn't make a difference. my dad just told me he updated the tv and there is a chance that is was connected at the time. could this have caused it to only read on the tv? if so how do i reverse this. also i stopped the chkdsk because it was going on three days and it still works fine on the tv.