windows 7 home edition 64 bit problems in recognize my passport 2TB

fnola · 03 Jan 2015

i bought new my passport 2 TB external usb drive.
the operating system recognize and installed the drivers necessary including the ses driver
the operation system wa not able to show the drive on the file system.
the problem was that i had to activate the partition through the disk management tool .

i solve the problem as follows :
1. go to disk management , you can do it from MyComputer->DiskManagment (right click on MyComputer/Computer).
2.see if windows recognize my passport drive.
3. press on drive , right click and choose activate partition.
4. give the drive a new letter.

That was my problem.
Hope it helped.

jumanji · 03 Jan 2015

Hi fnola,

Good you were able to resolve your problem.

But I want to forewarn you.:)

Is it a WD external portable listed here? External Portable Hard Drives Overview

Except the WD Elements portable, the other two My Passport Ultra and My Passport Ultra Metal are hardware encrypted. In case the drive electronics develops a fault anytime, it will be impossible to recover the data by the user by any conventional means we normally use in the case of unencrypted drives.

So do not put any data on it that you may regret losing.

strollin · 03 Jan 2015

I just got a WD Passport Ultra 2TB external the other day. I didn't need to do anything to it to begin using it, just plugged it into a USB port on my computer and started copying files to it. I'm not sure why the OP needed to activate the partition in order to use the drive. That shouldn't be necessary. I wonder if maybe someone had bought the drive, messed with the partition(s) then returned it? Fnola, are you sure it was a brand new drive?

I doubt the fact that you have Win 7 Home and I have Win 7 Ultra makes any difference.

@Jumanji - The drive is not encrypted by default, the user needs to set a pw and turn on the encryption. Since my drive is only used to store my movie collection, I have not turned the encryption on. If the user turns encryption on then forgets the PW or the drive develops a problem then the data will not be recoverable.

jumanji · 03 Jan 2015

strollin said:

.......@Jumanji - The drive is not encrypted by default, the user needs to set a pw and turn on the encryption. Since my drive is only used to store my movie collection, I have not turned the encryption on. If the user turns encryption on then forgets the PW or the drive develops a problem then the data will not be recoverable.

I asked this question to mjf recently 1TWD external hard disk unknown,not initialized,unallocated,i/o error Now I have got the answer from you. Thank you.

Please also see mjf's post preceding my post in that thread..

From all this and also various discussions in other forums, I am now inclined to think unless one consciously disables hardware encryption by installing the WD Security software, by default - without this software installed and hardware encryption disabled through it - the drive will encrypt using the hardware encryption chip.

This is a ten-month old write-up : Western Digital Hardware Encryption | Prosoft Engineering, Inc.Prosoft Engineering, Inc.

In any case I would avoid WD drives because there is so much going behind the scenes.If at all, users should buy only drives without hardware encryption built-in. There are better ways to protect one's data if one wants to.