Western Digital hard drive not displayed in My Computer

Gekko

Tried installing a WD My Passport Essential SE 1TB external hard drive and basically it's not displayed in My Computer. - I'm using a Toshiba Tecra laptop running XP.

Have tried going to the WD support page and downloaded a driver and then proceeded to google the problem.

Found some info suggesting I try and reassign a letter to the drive location, but if I right-click My Computer, select Disk Management, the drive is there but there is no letter assigned to it and if I right-click and try to re-assign a letter, it won't let me select any option.

There is just a blue bar where a letter should be that refers to the drive.

This may be an issue with XP...have emailed WD support but am not too hopeful about that.

When the drive was first used, a friend of mine formatted it and set it up so that she could save some video camera footage on there and this was done with a Mac.

However, this was done using the FAT32 file format meaning that the drive should still be able to be used either with Macs or PCs.

Any advice or help much appreciated!

I'd like to use this drive for backing up my laptop as well...at the moment it's basically no use to me.

bonzodog2

If I understand you right, it shows in DiskMgmt, theres no data you want on it ? Remove all partitions on it from DM, create new, format.

Gekko

It shows in Disk Management but I can't do anything with it there.

There is data I want on it - there's about 3 hours of video footage!

Armin_Tamzarian

I've got a similar problem with a WD Passport.
It won't show up as a drive in explorer, etc. but it will show up as a device in Dev Man.
I tried support page and various downloads but nothing worked.
It may have suffered damage as the result of a fall.

visual

ask your friend with mac to put the data on cd for you
then go back into disk manager and reformat the disk to NTFS and assign a drive letter.

I don't like apple products as I think it old technology in fancy styled rapping at ridiculous price but thats a different topic and the Apple fans will be jumping up and down

Gekko

Thanks Visual - My drive is looking a little battered - in fairness it was posted but with plenty of bubble wrap padding for protection.

I don't think the footage can be put on a CD or DVD unless it's compressed as there's quite a few gigs of raw video footage.

If they could do so, the drive would then have to be wiped and then perhaps I'd be able to use it.

However, I feel misled because when I bought it, it was sold as being compatible both with Mac and PC.

I contacted WD support but haven't heard anything from them. I had to make up an RMA number in order to send the message through their website so this may have something to do with it.

I will have to phone them I guess.

It's a real pain in the árse.

bonzodog2

So, your friend formatted it FAT32 from a Mac, and there is several GB of video data you want. There is a limit of 4GB filesize for FAT32, maybe the Mac has done something weird. If the data is smaller than DVD size (DVDR_size-4 707 319 808 ) you could burn it to disc (if the mac has a dvdrw drive !)

Maybe you could try downloading a live linux CD (that you boot from) and see if that will recocgnise the FAT32 partition.

Gekko

I had suggested to my friend that they split any video into a number of 4GB FAT 32 file sizes if needs be, but perhaps you're right and the Mac has done something weird.

I don't think the footage would fit on one DVD.

The live linux route sounds too technical for me, but thanks for the suggestions.