I bought my daughter, whose in college, a WD My Passport 1T external HD at Christmas. While home she transferred approximately 450GB worth of pictures, music, and school homework onto it mainly for backup storage because she had to format her computer.
This past week she plugged it into her laptop (Windows 7 OS), and tried to access the data, in which you also have to provide a password to unlock it. When she does this though it unlocks it but won't access her data. It doesn't matter if we left click on the icon in MY Computer or right click and select "open", she gets a screen that says "drive must be formatted to be used".
She came home this weekend, and we've tried it on a couple different computers to see if I could access it. I have two computers with XP and Vista OS. I kept getting the same results. So I called WD tech support, and they tried to access the data using a different route, but still the same message. He told me that if the USB drive is unplugged from a computer, after transferring data, without first clicking on a icon that tells you it's safe to disconnect it, it can corrupt the drive. I've used external HDs before and never heard of such a thing. My son uses one all the time and never has heard of this. So I don't know if this tech guy knows what he's talking about, and was just stumped at a solution.
So I thought I'd submit it on here, and hope some tech savvy person may be able to provide me with a way to get that very valuable data, especially the photos, off this drive, or if it's a lost cause. My daughter is simply furious.
Reply With Quote