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Western Digital My Passport Drive. USB 3.0 Portable External Hard Drive.

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Passport diagnostic report "Windows has found errors on this drive"

Worked perfectly last night. Has not been touched, moved, etc. since it was added. Now I see folders as they should be but each one claims to be empty when I try to open it. The drive is rated at 4TB and it currently has 3.1TB of data on it. I thought this was my most secure drive. I must find a way to save this data.

Update (01/18/2018)

I bought it through Amazon. It should be a legit device. It's only a couple of months old.

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Hmmm... thats suspicious. who did you buy it from? was it abnormally cheap?

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Amazon. It's only a couple of months old.

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Run the serial number throug Western Digital RMA.

https://support.wdc.com/warranty/warrant...

You can get a replacement so that you can transfer your data off to a replacement drive before sending back the broken drive.

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I have the exact same drive in from a customer with exactly the same issue. I have ordered in an identical drive so I can change the board on it to try to retrieve the data. Will report my results the first of next week.

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At this point I would stop using it (powered off) until you can figure out what to do.

  • You might be able to save the drive by using a drive recovery app Data Rescue 5
  • The other is to send it out to a recovery service if the drive is physically damaged (head crash).

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I powered off for a few hours and found I can access everything for a few hours before it stops working again. I'm in the process of copying everything to a more reliable WD 4TB external hard drive. It's taking a long time and I don't know how long until this thing becomes a paper weight.

This experience has shaken my confidence in WD products. I thought they were the best but now it turns out this thing is just as much junk as the crappy Toshiba external hard drive I bought a few years ago! Same scenario! Just as I filled that piece of junk with my best data it went belly up.

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@tromba, I don't think its brand specific. There are posts with seagates as well.

Either way, the best external enclosure are the ones you build yourself. Take a known high quality internal drive like WD Red, Green, or Purple series (designed to be data storage only), and put it in a external enclosure yourself. Not only can you change the enclosure or the drive if one independently breaks down, but you also get 3 or 5 year warranty on the drive itself depending on the model.

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Michael Malloy will be eternally grateful.
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