Western Digital Passport failing

hello all!

i've been using a WD passport external HD for my itunes for the past year and a half now. just recently, the drive has been giving me problems. a few weeks ago, it would take me a couple tries to transfer all the files i'd like to transfer to my itunes, for example, i'd add a new album to my itunes but some of the songs would not transfer. i'd have to try a couple of times. then, large files such as movies, stopped transferring. and now, i can't do much anything at all with the HD. it always says "unable to write or read from disk." it's really strange. the HD shows up (most of the time), my itunes will still connect to it and play the music from the HD. but i can't add or take anything from the HD. i was able to recover some files from the HD but not my movies. i used the HD for storage of other files, too along with my itunes.

i've tried using disk warrior to recover all of my itunes folder but because the drive was formatted FAT32, disk warrior won't work on the HD.

is there anything at all that i can do get this to work or in the least get my files off of it? i've hooked it up to other computers and it just doesn't work anymore. but it still mounts. i don't understand it. and it shows all of the files still being on the hard drive. please help!

thank you.

Go to the Western Digital support site and download the diagnostics software for your drive:

WD Support > Downloads > Select Product

You're probably going to need to run the diagnostics from a PC. Not sure it will work from OS X. Anyway, run the software. It will tell you if there are problems with the drive, and if possible repair them. (bad sectors)

How full is the drive? You say you hooked it to other computers - did you try to copy the files and folders from the drive when hooked to a Windows PC?

Also: If you can hook the drive to a computer running Linux, you may be able to access and copy the files from the drive that way.

Regards.

How full is the drive? You say you hooked it to other computers - did you try to copy the files and folders from the drive when hooked to a Windows PC?

Click to expand...

the drive is about 15-20 gb away from being full. and yes, i've tried hooking it up to a pc and it still fails to write and copy. gives an error message.

i will definitely run the diagnostic software, thank you for pointing that out. sure wish they had the software for a mac and not just pc...

thank you again.

so i'm running the diagnostic now. i've been thinking about it while it has been running and maybe, just maybe, the casing for the HD has gone bad? maybe that would explain why the drive still works and mounts but is no longer writable? it ha my itunes folder and it still reads it in itunes without a problem. but i can't add anything to the drive anymore. and when i try to manually copy a file from the drive to my computer HD, it won't do it, says there's an error. it's very strange.

error code -8, too many bad sectors.

does anyone know of a good software to recover the files? i downloaded some stuff but i have no idea how to use any of it. it's supposed to be used in DOS on a pc but i've no clue how to do any of that. i don't even know how to open the files that came with the software. i hate this.

IrishDoug83 said:

does anyone know of a good software to recover the files? i downloaded some stuff but i have no idea how to use any of it. it's supposed to be used in DOS on a pc but i've no clue how to do any of that. i don't even know how to open the files that came with the software. i hate this.

Click to expand...

Look for data recovery software that will run in Windows rather than DOS. In order to run any of that stuff in DOS it will have to either be placed on a bootable DOS floppy disk or CD.

More than likely some of your data is going to be located in the bad sector areas and may not be recoverable by ordinary means. But with the right software and a little bit of luck, you should be able to get most of it off the disk.

The fact that the Passport is nearly full also lends to the problem because most recovery software will try to move the data to unused and good areas of the drive before recovering it.

Regards.