A WD My Passport formatted with Mac file system will be a dud on the Windows and vice-versa. Thankfully, MS-DOS FAT32 and ex-FAT formats have survived to date, and these are the file system to make your WD My Passport work with a Mac and a Windows PC simultaneously.
I have a Western Digital My Passport 1TB USB3 that is readable from a laptop, but would not appear as a drive on my PC that runs Windows 7 64bit. I fixed the problem by reinstalling the driver for the drive with the following steps:. Open control panel, view devices and printers, find the drive (mine is labeled 'My Passport 0730'). Open properties of the drive, go to hardware tab, it will show 3 items in 'device functions'.
Open the properties of the item with type 'disk drives', press 'change settings'. Go to 'driver' tab, press 'uninstall' to uninstall the driver. Unplug the drive, plug it back. Windows will behave like the drive is plugged for the first time and install the driver for it After those steps, I can read the drive normally. This seems to be an odd issue with WD My Passport drives. For some reason, the USB registration of the WD Drive gets messed up.
It happens to me every couple months with mine on Windows 7 64bit. Here's how I fix it:. Unplug the drive from the computer. Open a command prompt as Administrator.
Type the following commands:. set devmgrshownonpresentdevices=1. devmgmt.msc. In the Device Manager:. Click View.
Select Show Hidden Devices. Expand the Disk Drives section. Right-click any 'WD My Passport' entries and select Uninstall. Expand your Universal Serial Bus controllers section. Right-click any entries here that are a light-grey icon and select Uninstall. Reconnect the WD My Passport drive and it should reappear as an available drive in Windows Explorer.