So I have a Sony bluray player, relatively new, that I had a WesternDigital My Passport drive plugged into. Everything was working fine. But then after a few hours of the Bluray player being off, it wouldn't recognize the My Passport drive anymore. After fiddling with it I decided to plug it into my computer. The drive turns on, the white indicator light blinks, but the only place it shows up in windows is under Devices and Printers, nothing in explorer, nothing in Disk Management, it shows up in Device Manager but nothing useful comes of it. I tried uninstalling drivers and plugging the My Passport into multiple computers but nothing. It seems like the drive is toast, the only conclusion I can find is that either the bluray player nuked it, or its a hell of a coincidence.
Anyone have anything similar happen? Or any advice?
Hmm, that's odd. I suppose it could have wrecked the partition table somehow, and disk manager in windows isn't always useful.
Open an administrator level command prompt. You can just search it in start then right click > open as administrator.
Run 'diskpart' it will open with it's own prompt.
Type 'list disk'. Hopfully it will pop up as a drive. BE VERY CAREFUL BEYOND THIS POINT, DISKPART GIVES NO FUCKS AND WILL COMPLETELY WIPE YOUR BOOT DRIVE IF YOU DO THIS WRONG.
If the disk does appear, you'll really only be able to see it be it's drive size. If it's there, use 'select disk #'.
If the disk is offline, be sure to use 'online' before running 'clean'. This will completely wipe all partitions off the disk. If there's anything that you HAVE to recover, that'll be another step. After using 'clean', you can exit diskpart, then it should appear as 'un-allocated' in disk manager, for which it can then be formatted.
Well it is listed as online, I would like to keep the data if its possible. If I clean it, all the data will be erased no?
Well the damn thing came back to life after being plugged in for ~24 hours.
That's good to know, cleaning it wouldn't necessarily erase everything, but you would need a file recovery tool to get it back.