Western Digital Driver won't update - software says its in use  

Hello. I have a Western Digital My Passport and I'm having issues getting the driver to update.

About a week ago I was downloading some torrents (writing to my passport) and I began to get this dowload error on utorrent - cyclic redundancy check. After a few days of fighting with utorrent I discovered that my pc wouldn't even recognize the device. Everything I read about CRC errors pointed to the drive going bad. I was having a lot of issues with windows explorer not responding at the time so I panicked and reformatted all of my partitions on my pc. Because my reasoning was that if I had just sacrificed all of my media and reformatted the drive (external) maybe I could have saved it from going bad altogether.

Now that I have Windows reinstalled I can focus on troubleshooting my external drive. I've just attempted to update the driver (firmware) from the WD firmware upgrader, but I keep getting an error which says that the drive is currently in use. But I am not tranferring anything nor am I writing anything to it. It's like it is trying to communicate with windows explorer somehow and that is causing a conflict. I'm not sure really, but I'm open to any all suggestions. Thanks.

I think I may have confused you. I didn't reformat the external drive, I reformatted the drive on the pc. I wasn't able to update the firmware on the external drive in question because my pc can no longer recognize the drive.

To be clear, my pc had issues recognizing the external drive prior to reformatting the pc drive.

Mark Phelps said:

Any firmware on the external WD drive already got updated when you did it before. You don't need to do it again now that you have reinstalled Windows. Reformatting the external drive would have no effect on its firmware.

One commenter on a similiar thread said: "These drives come with drive firmware and "Smartware" software. WD recommend you use the most up todate version. See the link. Updating may solve your problem. Personally I stick with the Elements (bare bones) range. The driver is handled by Windows."

I'm not sure I wanna condemn the drive altogether yet. I'm not sure whether it's a driver issue or not; it may just need replacing. I'm curious if I were to invest in an external drive with a driver which is handled by Windows as the Elements range apparently does, if I would have less issues with the driver or with the device in general. I think the Elements range is a desktop external drive. I'm not really sure what are the pro's and cons there. Is a desktop external harddrive not portable at all or how does that work?

Also, I would like to know if it is problematic writing torrents on to an external drive.

See, that's what I was thinking too but I can't seem to get into it long enough to format it. At least not from Disk Management. Actually, I just opened up Disk Management and then plugged it in and I had a diclaimer pop up saying that I can't use the drive until it has been formatted. But then whenever I click format it says I need to plug it in.

matts6887 said:

Well if you had issues getting windows to detect the external drive it may need to be formatted before windows might detect it. Windows itself will also need a driver in order for windows to detect it. As for the torrents well you probably are better off writing them to a external drive anyways so if something happens it doesn't knock out your main system drive