Accidentally dropped my WD passport ext drive, and while it spins and lights, it takes my laptop a while to see it, but then cnnot open the drive to access it. Please help, as it has all of my iTunes music on it!
Thanks!

I just fixed two of these this week. Is it the MyBook ones? The circuit boards in them are crap. I ended up taking it apart removing all the add-on pieces and putting the drive in a hard drive enclosure.

Yeah, the drive itself if probably fine, just all of the other stuff they throw in the case is bad. If you can remove just the drive itself, put that in your computer, or into an external HD case (ebay) then it'll probably work fine for the next few years.

I recommend you run some diags on your drive. If it comes ready and is seen by the system, it isn't very likely to be a PCB problem. More likely you've caused problems internal to the drive, i.e. head crash or motor damage.

Remove the plastic casing. Peel the foil back. Slowly remove the "usb card front section" from the "hard drive section".

Purchase a "FREE AGENT GOFLEX UPGRADE CABLE - USB 3.0...MADE BY SEAGATE" (about $20 at BestBuy). Plug it ino the hard drive section, plug the other end into you computer & it's FIXED!

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Originally Posted by NeedKarma

I just fixed two of these this week. Is it the MyBook ones? The circuit boards in them are crap. I ended up taking it apart removing all the add-on pieces and putting the drive in a hard drive enclosure.

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I, too, dropped my WD Passport external hard drive. So, if I take it apart and get out the hard drive in it, and put it in one of the SATA HD enclosures, I should be able to access the data?

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Originally Posted by shannamar

I, too, dropped my WD Passport external harddrive. So, if I take it apart and get out the harddrive in it, and put it in one of the SATA HD enclosures, I should be able to access the data?

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Yep that's what I did.

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Originally Posted by NeedKarma

Yep that's what I did.

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I am not a computer guru by any stretch. If I were to do this and take out the hard drive and transfer it to a case, and it still didn't work, would I be out of luck or would I still be able to try to send it to a data recovery place like DriveSavers?

You should be successful unless the hard drive platters tapped the heads. Whatever service you send it too afterward would be very pricey.

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Originally Posted by NeedKarma

You should be successful unless the hard drive platters tapped the heads. Whatever service you send it too afterward would be very pricey.

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Okay.. thank you very much. I have years and years of photos on this thing that I only recently moved from my desktop onto it. Not to mention years and years of documents and volumes of music. I only have about 10 MB store or something very minor, on the 250 MB hard drive, but I am saddened.

I think I'll try this then go with the next route - however pricey it may be.

Thanks for helping me with this and for writing back so quickly.

Hi,

Do you manage the it work?
I have just dropped by My Passport few days ago.. and couldn't access the drive.

Thanks

Kind of curious on the OPs outcome. I too had a fall out with my wd passport se and it stopped reading. The case is half cracked anyway and pealing, so I'm thinking about taking the actual hard disk out and putting it in my desktop PC as a SATA drive. Hopefully I know what I'm doing lol.

Passport is not working on any computer. I do have a second passport, which is working properly. Please advise. Very frustrated. Thank you

All right! I know the dropped hard drive could be tricky to fix.

Actually, the dropped hard drive is often damaged logically or physically.
The logically damaged drive often can be repaired after re-formatting and the contained data also could be restored with the help of data recovery program.
However, oppositely, the physically damaged drive often cannot be fixed and the stored data is also gone with the physical drive.

So, disconnect this drive to your computer and use a data recovery program to take a chance.

In order to avoid data recovery failure, you’d better not save anything else on the same drive. Anything new on the same drive could rewrite your inaccessible data and make it gone permanently.

And then, select a proper data recovery program to retrieve your inaccessible data back.
Here are some free data recovery programs that could help you a lot:
Best 6 FREE Data Recovery Software with each tutorial to recover deleted data

If this really makes no difference, you’d better take it to an expert for help as soon as possible.