Western Digital My Passport Hard Drive Problem

I have a WD My Passport which was working fine until today. I plugged it into a number of computers and it is recognized, however, the message I get is " This drive needs to be formatted". I am unable to view any files on the drive, and the WD software program gives the same message.

How can I recover my files from this drive ? I have laptops, with Windows 7 and XP, a desk top with Windows 8, and I could load Vista if that would help ?

Any suggestions ? :cry

 

The MBR is hosed on it. Over at http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-Porta...-be-formatted-It-has-300gb/td-p/143914/page/2 They are stating to try easeus partition master home edition which you can get from here on Majorgeeks, at http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/easeus_partition_master_home_edition.html

 

You were quicker than me Maj. Attitude. I got slowed down by doing some searching. For the OP either one will work, try the first suggestion first.

 

Now if not, the question will be if WD will RMA the unit for a new one. I know they have done that in the past with certain units.

 

Thanks for your replies. I will try and get back with my results. I don't care about the drive, just the data on it.

 

I tried the recuva, earlier. It came up with things I didn't recognize. Do you have any recommendations as to which one to try ? (On that page). The partition master will erase everything, correct ?

Oddly, I do back up my external hard drives. I just hadn't done this one in a couple weeks ! Ugh.

 

Update:

As expected, the freeware programs couldn't do it. EASEUS and MiniTool Power Data can do it, for a price. The 7 Data recovery was incredibly faster at locating and summarizing the files. The other two take hours. However, 7 Data isn't as reliable.

The freeware programs seem to be good at finding deleted items.

 

Oops,it is the MiniTool power data that was, as the 7 Data Recovery that was slow, sorry

 

I agree with you, freeware tools are not reliable to restore data. Few weeks ago I have also used one free software to recover files from hard drive and it permanently deleted my entire data. Therefore .it is always better to go for any trustable data recovery tool like. The tool, which I am talking about, is a paid software but you can go for its demo version just to check its performance.