WD Passport WD1600U017-005

I have a WD 160GB Passport that may have died. When I plug it in I can
feel the drive spinning and the little green arrow shows up in the lower
right hand corner to "safely remove hardware" , however the drive letter
does not show up in the my comuter file. If I right-click on my
computer, it locks things up, but if I disconnect the WD Passport, then
the right-click works properly. If I right-click on my computer and
click device manager with the WD Passport plugged in, it once again
locks up the computer. Now if I open the device manager without the WD
Passport plugged in, click on disk drives, only the main hard drive
appears. But if I now plug in the WD Passport, it does show up under
disk drives, and if I click on the WD drive, it tells me that the device
is working properly. I did back up my data about a month ago, but if
possible would like to retrieve as much as I can. I will try the bag
and freezer trick as a last resort. Please help if you can. Hopefully
my drive is not totally dead. Thanks

bblr wrote:
I have a WD 160GB Passport that may have died. When I plug it in I
can feel the drive spinning and the little green arrow shows up in
the lower right hand corner to "safely remove hardware" , however the
drive letter does not show up in the my comuter file. If I
right-click on my computer, it locks things up, but if I disconnect
the WD Passport, then the right-click works properly. If I
right-click on my computer and click device manager with the WD
Passport plugged in, it once again locks up the computer. Now if I
open the device manager without the WD Passport plugged in, click on
disk drives, only the main hard drive appears. But if I now plug in
the WD Passport, it does show up under disk drives, and if I click on
the WD drive, it tells me that the device is working properly. I did
back up my data about a month ago, but if possible would like to
retrieve as much as I can. I will try the bag and freezer trick as a
last resort. Please help if you can. Hopefully my drive is not
totally dead. Thanks

The USB stack can get rather screwed. See what happens on a different PC if you can.

I've tried it on 4 different computers. All do the same thing.

bblr wrote:

I've tried it on 4 different computers. All do the same thing.

If you want to get the data off it, it would be worth trying the
drive in a different enclosure, but that will void the warranty.

Thanks. I will try that. Nothing to lose at this point.