Faizan Butt,
I have a WD 320GB Passport that has been extremely unreliable, but for me it the problems began very early on- perhaps the first two months. There are three partitions and sometimes the Windows Explorer doesn't recognize any partition and other times one , two, or all. It works, then doesn't or partly works, which to me is about the most dangerous form of untrustworthy behavior. I have had such bad luck with the Passport- and have seen many, many posts in many, many forums with the same problem- that I feel I just can't trust it.
But, before reformatting the drive and erasing everything, I believe it is worth trying methods to recover the files. >
1> What I've noticed is that this Passport is more reliable on one USB port of my 2008 Dell Precision and in general, the chances of it working increase the closer the port is to the motherboard. Yes, it doesn't make a lot of sense, but that seems to be the case and after I discovered this by trying it, found other posts that said the same. I thought it may be that the front ports have been plugged and unplugged so often that the connector- the socket- becomes worn and makes an unreliable connection, whereas the rear ports are not often changed.
2> I assume that the Passport contains a standard 2.5" notebook drive in an enclosure with a board that converts the signal suitable to USB use. If you're adventurous, you might consider taking the drive out of the enclosure and, and if it has the standard data and power connections, connect it directly to an SATA port in the computer. Be careful with the placement so it doesn't fall. If this works, you can transfer the data to an internal HD on your system.
2A> If the drive works reliably with this connection, there are 3.5" to 2.5" drive adapters and the drive can be installed it as an additional drive in the system.
3> Another method that preserves the portability would be to buy a 2.5" USB drive enclosure and reinstall the drive in it. It would seem to increase the chances of working- to look for one with better heat dissipation as it occurred to me that these things are packed into very close-fitting enclosures without any apparent provision for cooling.
An alternative for the future >
I have a 5-year old Seagate 160GB 3.5" USB 2.0 drive that has never failed once- completely reliable on four systems. it seems it may last forever as I only run it about a half hour per week- it is not permanently running.
Because the old Seagate 3.5 external drive always worked, a couple of months ago when I bought a new HP z420 wwith USB 3.0, I bought a Star Tech 3.5" USB 3.0 drive enclosure with a power switch and switchable cooling fan (about $38) and installed a Seagate Baracuda 500GB. This runs quietly, stays cool and so far has had no problems. It is quite nicely made too- black Aluminum and blue LED's and sits vertically and made to look like a book.. The 160GB drive had 15-25MB/s transfer rates and the Startech being USB 3.0 runs at 75-130MB/s. Of course, the 3.5 enclosure requires a plug-in power adapter in addition to the USB connection for data, and is much larger to carry around, but is worth the extra fuss. I use this to backup by only switching the USB cable from the old Dell and the new HP. See >
http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-3-5in-SuperSpeed-Drive-Enclosure/dp/B003F5NS9W/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1392450731&sr=8-1&keywords=star+tech+3.5%22+drive+enclosure
If I need portability, I use a 16GB Adata USB 3 flash drive.
I wish you good luck with this problem. An unreliable back up drive is worse than no back up drive as it is a false security. The idea of losing backup data is very worrisome.
Cheers,
BambiBoom
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