I cannot access my WD passport. It keeps bleeping and the white light continually flashes.
The PC immediately reports that E drive cannot be accessed due to I/O error. I have tried all the basic stuff and read some other ideas but my IT skills are basic and I am not comfortable to leave it with some guys to fix. Any help would be great.
Take it apart, most external drives embed a 2,5" drive such as the ones used in laptops and a controller that converts USB to SATA.
Once you have the drive out you may plug it directly into a desktop computer (it won't fit in the case but the power and data cables will be the same) and hope for the best, it may be that the USB<->SATA converter board was faulty and not the drive, otherwise there's not much hope left, besides taking it to a data recovery professional with a big check if your data is that valuable*.
But you have backups, right?
I actually don´t know what exactly did you try, but here are my some steps to try:
Step 1 Check the USB cable connection for the drive - try with different one and reconnect it to see if that corrects the I/O problems.
Step 2 Update the WD device driver. Restart the computer after updating the device driver to see if it corrected the I/O error problems. Do you see your device in Disk Management?
Step 3 Run the Windows Chkdsk tool to see if the drive or storage device has bad sectors or media causing the I/O errors. To run Chkdsk, click the Start button, then type "Chkdsk X: /f /r where "X" is the drive letter of the WD My Passport.
Step 4 Download the WD tool Data Lifeguard Diagnostics from here: http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=810&lang=en and test your drive.
If you take out the hard disk of the My Passport, it'll void your warranty. Also, have in mind that you WD My Passport is hardware encrypted, so if you take it out of its enclosure, you won't be able to read it and extract your data. If your device is new, you could consider RMA, you can check here: http://support.wdc.com/warranty/index.asp?wdc_lang=en
Please, come and share what happened with the tests.
Hope that I helped.
KY_WD
