HELP = Passport essential WD hard drive

[Heather Positive Thinker]

As some of you know I bought this external hardrive only a couple of months back. Today after doing a lot of typing I thought I better back it up. I plugged the usb into the puter and the passport but I only get the left hand column come up on the screen, the right hand one has text in it something like WD writing partition not found?

panic over! Ive googled and found out I have to reformat the hard drive thing. Ive gone through it all and its working again I think - well it just completed a full back up anyway.

[Margaret N]

Hi Heather,

How do you use your WD External Drive that you need to re-format it? I have used a WD External for about two years and can never remember formatting it.

I do find it difficult on odd occassions to copy some itmes to it as I like to keep an older version say of My Documents and then add the current one and all it wants to do is update the old version on backup. I have tried changing the name of the file that I have already saved and that used to work. Now it remembers what the old file was and wants to update it. Still I get there in the end.

[Heather Positive Thinker]

I dont know Margaret, I think they are quite fragile from what I was reading. I just had nothing come up and that message so I did a lot of googling and there were a lot of people saying the same thing and some remedies. It was bit of a performance to be honest but the articles seemed to say just jerking the usb as you take it out is enough to reset the thing so you need to format it.

[Elaine ..Spain]

Surely if you reformat it then you will lose any data which you have already backed up!

[Mike Fisher]

I have been using a 160gb WD Passport with the Portable Apps Suite running on it for ages with no problem, my wife has one which appeared to pack up but it was the short usb lead that came with it that had failed ,I replaced it and all her files were there.

[Heather Positive Thinker]

Yes Elaine, thats correct but as all the files were still on my puter, it was ok. They were just backed up again after I sorted it.

Mike, you may well be correct there as I could see the hard drive itself was flashing and whirring, so working ok, it may be the little usb was faulty.