WD Passport Ultra Stops Working out of nowhere

Question

My WD Passport Ultra has stopped showing up in device manager/windows explorer and anywhere really.

I've tried it on a different computer and with a different USB 3.0 cable as well as plugging it into my Xbox 360.

The problems began last night when I purchased downloadable games through Xbox Live and began downloading them to a reserved portion on my Passport. My xbox ended up freezing a couple of times and when I eventually got it to turn on a notification of my xbox popped up saying "device full" I checked the device as I knew that there was at least 8GB to download the game.

After realizing that the passport was simply unplugged I plugged it back in and I was presented with an "Unformated" text that appeared over my drive. Upon some online research I realized I would need to format the drive. I was not able to access any of the data on my 360 but was still able to connect and use the passport on my Windows 8 PC.

I backed all of the files up, then formatted using NTFS. Now that it was formatted with NTFS I figured I should be good but no. The 360 needs FAT32 so I was trying to format a portion using FAT32 and the drive was very unstable, things like 3rd party FAT32 tools would constantly freeze and present errors when formatting my drive and when I plugged it back into my Windows 8 PC it was very unpredictable in the sense that it would sometimes show up under windows, sometimes show up under device manager, and on the xbox it would show up but without any text indicating the name or that it was even removable storage. Frustrated I went to bed that night.

The current problem:

So today when I plugged my device in to my xbox 360/My windows 8 PC/or another Windows 7 PC belonging to a family member it will not show up at all! The one thing that does show up under both PCs is the ability to safely eject the drive. It doesnt show up in disk manager nor windows explorer. This is EXTREMELY frustrating as I know its recognizable by multiple computers, but I just cant do anything with it! I can feel the drive vibrating and the light it flashing meaning that it works but it is still not recognizable.

How do I resolve this?

Answer 1

I would start with running WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=810&sid=3&lang=en . You can run both the quick and extended tests on the drive. If WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics cannot detect the drive it's possible it had failed. You should also try using a different USB 3.0 cable and make sure it's a short one. If none of that helps you should contact WD support: http://support.wdc.com/contact/index.asp?lang=en )