Well, this is my wifes external hard drive she uses to back up most of her photos, she's a hobby photographer. Last night she told me that it stopped working and asked me to see what was up. She told me that for about the last week she would be using it and it would randomly 'disappear' and she would have to unplug it from the USB 3.0 port, and plug it into the USB 2.0 port to get it working again. Now what it's doing, is not allowing me to access the files regardless of what port its plugged in to. When I plug it in, it tells me I need to format it, which I say cancel. When I open up the file browser and go to the computer portion, it shows a external drive, with drive letter but when I attempt to access it, it says 'E: is not accessible, the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable' So I did some googling and saw that some people were recommending a program called Active Partition Recovery, and that the boot sector on the hard drive might be damaged.

So i downloaded the program and used it to look at the boot sector, which it said was a-ok. So I googled some more, found some info about running chkdsk and I figured I could run that and find out what was going on, so i tried it out and chkdsk ran but as soon as it finished its scan the DOS window closed and I couldn't see what it said in time.

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So I went back to the Active Partition Recovery program, and used its 'super scan' to check the drive and hopefully see what was going on. It would get a few minutes into the scan, then the drive would 'unmount' and the program would freeze, I tried this several times. I had the drive plugged into the USB 3.0 port so I switched over to the 2.0 and tried again, then the scan worked. According to the program all the 'sectors' are ok and I can see all the folders and file names in it's file browser. This program does have an option to 'recover' the drive by copying all the data to another disk, however I don't have another drive with enough room to do this at the moment. Bookkeeping software for mac. I did a little more googling and found some info about a program called Recuva and that it might be able to help me out.

I tried that and when I tried to view the folders/files with that it gave me an error 'unable to read MFT'. Now the error in windows has changed from what it was before and if I try to open the disk it says 'E: is not accessible, the parameter is incorrect' I think right now my best bet is to buy another 1tb drive and try to use Active Partition Recovery to copy the files/folders onto that drive, but I was hoping that maybe somebody may have some advice for me on how to fix this one, what the heck went wrong, or how to make sure my recovery goes ok. Well your plan sounds potentially feasible for the immediate solution, though is high in the risk of failure category anyway. If the USB 3.0 cord is bent/broken or the USB/Sata board inside the case is defective, you still would be 'screwed' in this endeavour. I would suggest the BEST solution to validate a few things is 1) try this drive in another computer do you get the same results If NO then it is simply removing the device from the Device Manager, reboot and reconnect the drive to force Windows to use the correct Driver for it. 2) If yes then I would start unscrewing the case and physically remove the drive from the housing.

Remove the WD Passport and place the device into a freezer zip lock bag. Also take out one paper towel and fold it into the the shape of the device. Now place both ino the bag. Seal and place that into your freezer for 24 hours. After that point take it out and let it get back room temp. Then try using it again. Connect the WD drive to the Mac computer. Double left-click on the Mac HD, the internal Mac hard drive visible on the top-right corner of the desktop screen. Choose Applications from the left-side panel. From the Applications folder, open Utilities, and lastly double-click on Disk Utility.

Get a new USB/Sata connector, and try this in the 2nd computer. Does it still act the same bad way? If no, success!, now try this in her computer and see what happens 3) If yes, then the drive has failed, you can ATTEMPT the Active Partition Recovery / Spare 1TB solution, but you now know your expectations are very low for 100% success (your goal).