Got a WD Passport with a few movies on & loads of photo’s, connected it to the laptop to look for some photo’s & it doesn’t seem to be recognised (by 2 different laptops) & It’s going ‘bip’ about every 3 seconds & the little led is flashing.
Anything obvious to look for or is it screwed? & if so is there any way I can retrieve my stuff?
Thanks.

Is the Bip more like a click? If so the drive is damaged. Whether or not you will be able to retrieve files I don’t know.

Revert to your backups.

Can you extract the drive from the caddy?

Yep it’s a ‘bip’ (a very short beep) rather than a ‘click’. How does something that sits in a drawer for weeks/months on end & does very little get damaged ffs?

Can you extract the drive from the caddy?

We don’t have a tea caddy or a golf caddy Cougar, I’m a simpleton, no idea what your’e on about!

A “passport” is a regular disk in a posh box. Which is only a single character away from David Beckham and his wife.

This happened to my wife’s WD external drive, took it to the local pc shop and he managed to get all photos off onto another drive

Bargain price of £14 including new external hard drive

A “passport” is a regular disk in a posh box.

Is it? I thought the newer one had the SATA/USB gubbins built into the HD.

Revert to your backups.

I thought an external HD was a backup, or am I wrong (again?)

Cheers Frankers, might have to try that if all else fails.

I thought an external HD was a backup, or am I wrong (again?)

Egh? It’s only a “back-up” if it’s stored somewhere else too. Most people use an external to keep a back-up copy of what is stored on their computer. Sounds like this is the only place you have these things stored – or do you have copies of them somewhere else?

I managed to kill 3 WD Passport external drives in the space of 18 months. They are not the most robust storage media but they are cheap.
My external dives have a hard life as they spend most of the time on a boat in the tropics where high humidity, a salty environment and bumpy seas are a fact of life.
I now only use Freecom tough drives and have not had a failure since.
I currently have a 250 GB for computer back up a 1 TB for video capture and am awaiting delivery of a new 2 TB to back up my back ups.

I’ve had the beeping issue a few times. Plugging it into my windows 7 machine always seems to fix it – windows picks up on the error and asks if it should scan and fix faults.

WD passport hard drives don’t like being plugged in to anything other than a proper USB port with the USB lead that came with it, either. I have one that is now used as a time machine back up, and it just will not work plugged in with a USB splitter type thingy.

Is it? I thought the newer one had the SATA/USB gubbins built into the HD.

News to me if so.

Most people use an external to keep a back-up copy of what is stored on their computer. Sounds like this is the only place you have these things stored – or do you have copies of them somewhere else?

Yes we have stuff copied on other devices, cards, sticks etc & also between 3 laptops but there were some photo’s that weren’t as they used to be on a PC that died a horrible death & the only backup for those is on the Passport. 😐

Not sure if this will help but we had similar problems with an external HD in that it would whirr then beep and that was it. Our computer man told us it was a problem with the device not getting enough power through the USB port and he brought a USB cable with two USB connections at the one end to plug into the computer and hey pesto the thing started working perfectly.