Western Digital 120GB Passport - RANT!

[TheGreatSatan]

This damn drive is GARBAGE!!

First off, it comes with a standard USB cable and no external power. My [awesome] Maxtor One Touch has a USB Y-cable so two USB ports can power the drive.

At first the Passport worked, but needed a little cable shaking to get the computer to recognize the drive, but after loading 30GB worth of data it's not recognizing it at all. Worse part is that WD's diagnostic software says that it works fine. They won't honor any part of the warranty if the diagnostic comes back good

[jdbnsn]

I feel ya dogg.

[Scotty]

My dad has a 80GB one i've found sometimes on his PC it'll only work in the back ports directly on the mobo, i think thats because the front ones are only ver 1.1 and not 2.0

[TheGreatSatan]

I've tried it on 5 different computers and every time it causes everything to freeze. If you pull the plug then everything comes back.

[Luke122]

TGS: I've seen the same issue with external USB hdd's locking the PC.

Vista seems to have huge troubles with them, though XP did the same for one that I was using.

If WD wont warranty it, will the retailer exchange it? If not, you might be hooped for warranty anyways, so open that biznatch up and slave the drive into the PC and run some serious tools on it.

[dexaroni]

Not trying to belittle your issue, but I have a Passport, and I use it on my Vista system all the time... and I love it.

[Zephik]

Not trying to belittle your issue, but I have a Passport, and I use it on my Vista system all the time... and I love it.

Same here.

Sorry about your passport TGS, maybe its a bad one?

[Xpirate]

I have a 40 GB passport drive. It works okay on most computers. However, I had one that it would not work with at all. It was a software problem because I recently gave that computer to someone else who put a fresh install of XP on it, and it reads the drive just fine now. I extensively jacked with the registry to try and make it work. The fresh install fixed that problem and lots of other little problems I had with the machine.

[TheGreatSatan]

It must be the drive itself. When I first received it, it worked fine and let me save about 30GB worth of data. It just annoys me now because "My Computer" sees it, but won't let me open it to access any of the files. I have copies of all of those files elsewhere so no big deal. When I ran WD's diagnostic tool it said it was working fine. I might crack it open and use it as a normal drive. It's just a laptop HD inside right? I'm at a loss. At this point I just don't care.

[Xpirate]

You should try it on another XP machine before you crack it open. I managed to get my bad install of XP to see it with "my computer," but I could not read or write to it.