WD Passport Flashing but not accessible!

cormie

Hey folks,
I was backing up some files a few hours ago to 2 WD passports for the first time in ageeess. Both passports connected fine initially and I dropped the 1GB or so of files into them no prob, then the light on one of them started constantly flashing as if it was busy. The computer slowed down and the desktop went black for a minute and then came back to normal, minus a few icons in the system tray. I also have CrashPlan set up to back up onto one of them, so I thought it was just this being busy, but the crashplan icon had disappeared too, so I left it for a few hours thinking it was crashplan backing up but came back and see nothing had changes so on checking again, after unplugging and reconnecting, different ports etc, I see the drive just starts to flash, even with crashplan closed before I connect the drive, it's all the same.

The drive shows up in my computer simply as "F" but doesn't show the size or anything and is just constantly flashing when connected and again seems to slow everything down, opening disk management with it connected, it doesn't load properly, but if I plug it out, disk management loads properly immediately.

Thankfully the other drive has all the same files as the one that isn't responding, so if it's after failing, it'll be just a case of a simple replacement and transfer of the files over, but I'm hoping it's something more simple.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

ED E

The system is hanging as its failing to read the partition tables. That could be just a dud sector or it could be a sign she's on the way out.

Testdisks MFT repair may get it working again, then check SMART.