Solved Cannot see USB hard drive anymore and can't initialize...

Plugged in my WD 'My Passport' 1TB HD, and instead of the usual prompts to do something with it, nothing happens at all now. I have noticed that it no longer has a letter assigned to it and when i attempt to initialize the drive, it tells me:





"access is denied"...

How do i gain access again so I can initialize the drive?

P.S. The USB eject icon when pressed, shows "Eject my Passport", so it's clearly able to see the drive...

Thanks for your help, I suck at this stuff!

Hello Szyhawk!


Is this a new hard drive or it already has information on it? If it does, then Initializing the disk would erase your data!
Now, if I see correctly, the drive is shown as almost 1TB, as it should but Unallocated. That usually means it doesn't have any partitions or file system on it. This could mean that the partitions are lost.
Has anything happened recently or the last time you used the drive? Like a power shortage or virus or something else?
Make sure you are the owner of the drive and that you are using an administrator account.


CK_WD

Hey CK_WD!

It has 300-400GB of movies and media on it already. I'm not sure what happened that caused the change as i was using it last week...

Is there someway to access it to recreate partitions?

Hey again Szyhawk!


There are different softwares to try and detect and possibly recover your lost partition(s). The more interesting matter here is why is it showing the "Access is denied" error?
There are a few possibilities and options.
The first one, most obvious is that sometimes when not enough power is supplied, like when using a hub instead of direct connection, the disk may show up but not allow any action on it. So make sure you are using a direct USB connection to the PC with USB 3.0, even try it with a different cable.
Another option to try is to make sure you, your account is the owner of the drive, also use an Administrator account.
Check if you have all latest drivers and firmware, including on the drive.
Another thing you could try is to use the drive on another machine, and if you can, probably with Windows7. See if you could initialize it there, if you need the information copy it elsewhere and see if then the drive would work on your Windows 8 machine.


I hope any of this would help you!
Best of luck!

CK_WD

Did you use the option to assign a password to the drive when you first started using it? Because, that causes the drive to be encrypted and after that, without supplying the password, you can't access the drive.

Hey CK,

I have made sure I am the administrator, I have updated the drives for the WD external HD, I have been using the USB 3.0 port directly from the laptop... And so far to no avail... The option I haven't tried is to plug it into another machine (maybe a Mac?) to see if that does the trick...

Thanks for your help though!


@Mark - Yes I have the password enabled. But i haven't seen a way to enter it yet. I only get "access denied". I would love to be able to input the password as I agree, this is a major hurdle...

Any suggestions?

Thanks for your help!

@Mark - Yes I have the password enabled. But i haven't seen a way to enter it yet. I only get "access denied". I would love to be able to input the password as I agree, this is a major hurdle...

Click to expand...

My limited understanding of how WD implements access control on their external drives is that they run some software that integrates well with MS Windows but does not integrate at all with other OSs. Also, once you decide to password protect the hard drive, it is encrypted in hardware -- preventing any access without entering the password through the Windows front end.

I can get in again!!

I went back to the WD website and found a package called "Drive Utilities" which I thought would auto run when i restarted. It didn't, but when I opened the program "drive utilities" first then plugged in the hard drive it suddenly showed up and asked me for a password!

So it was a driver issue after all...

Thanks for your help guys!

when I opened the program "drive utilities" first then plugged in the hard drive it suddenly showed up and asked me for a password!

Click to expand...

That shows that this utility has to be running in order for you to access the drive.

If you want or need the ability to access this drive from other OSs (you mentioned a Mac), you need to consider removing the password.

Hello again, Szyhawk!


I'm glad you were able to get in your external hard drive! Though, the WD Drive Utilities aren't really drivers for the hard drive, it's a software that allows you to configure, manage and diagnose your WD drive; you could also erase and format the drive, set sleep timer, register the drive etc.
Somehow you were able to open up the pop-up password screen when loading the program. It could still be adriver issue.
I would suggest you removing the password and trying to access the drive again. Also, you'll need to reformat the drive, which means data loss, in order to use it on OS X.
Also, the drives work well with both Windows and OS X, depending of course on the system format they have. Shortly speaking, the exFAT is now the format to work read/write processes on both OSs, wWindows – from 7 on and Mac – from Lion on.
Remove your password, diagnose your drive, scan it and see what errors it would give out. Try it again,see if it works.


Best of luck!


CK_WD

Greaaaaattttt!!!

Hello Everyone in this thread!

I want to inform you that,

I'VE JUST CREATED AN ACCOUNT IN THIS FORUM, ONLY TO MAKE THIS COMMENT!

I was trying for more than four hours to find a solution to this naughty 'ACCESS DENIED" problem!
I have gone through about 100 pages and links!

Finally, this method worked!

I'm soooo glad!

Thanks everyone!

Big time guys it works
Been struggling with this problem all day long and I ‘ve tried everything but this came out really helpful.
I though I lost all my files and stuff in there... the problem was that I have just formatted my pc and I couldnt access my WD MyBook and I ve tried every single tutorial out there but only this worked thanks a lot I really appreciate it ...