Fixed: WD My Passport Ultra Not Showing Up/Detected

"I have a WD My Passport Ultra 1TB portable drive for storing important personal files. Suddenly, the WD Passport ultra is not showing up on my PC.
How do I fix My WD Passport Ultra not showing up on my computer?"

WD My Passport Ultra not showing up

When your WD My Passport Ultra hard drive or external hard drive is not showing up, you can neither access nor use the drive on your computer.

But don't worry. Follow this guide, you'll learn the causes and fixes to the WD Passport Ultra external hard drive not showing up error on your own.

Here is the complete guide to making your WD Passport external hard drive detected again:

PAGE CONTENT:

Fix 1. Fix Corrupted File System/Bad Sector
Fix 2. Add New Drive Letter
Fix 3. Plug WD My Passport Halfway-in-USB
Fix 4. Try a Different USB Cable/Port or PC
Fix 5. Update WD External Device Driver & Reinstall BUS Controllers
Fix 6. Send Disk for Repair

Some of you may also want to learn what causes the wd external hard drive not showing up on the computer. Continue reading and check it out.

Why is My WD Passport Not Showing Up?

We consulted many experienced users and IT professionals, and we concluded the causes below. Check out why is your WD Passport Ultra external not showing up:

1. A faulty USB port/cable, or a damaged USB hub on PC
2. Corrupted file system or bad sectors makes WD drive unreadable
3. No drive letter is assigned to WD Passport drive
4. WD drive driver is out of date
5. Universal USB controllers drivers are outdated

These causes may also lead to some of your other devices malfunctioning, such as:

WD External Disk Not Recognized Hard Drive Not Showing Up SSD Not Showing

So how to fix these errors and make your WD Passport Ultra external hard drive show up on PC again? Follow through the tutorials below to get rid of this issue immediately.

Part 1. Check The State of WD External Hard Disk in Disk Management

Connect the WD external hard drive to your computer via the USB cable. Follow steps here to check the state of your WD external hard drive in Disk Management:

Step 1. Press Windows + R keys, type diskmgmt.msc in the Run box, and click "OK".

Open Disk Management

Step 2. In Disk Management, locate and check the state of your WD external hard drive.

Part 2. Fix WD My Passport External Hard Drive Not Showing Up Error

Check the state of your not showing up or not detected WD My Passport Ultra external hard drive and refer to the right fix to make your drive work normally again.

Fix 1. Check and Fix Corrupted File System/Bad Sector on Not Detected WD Disk

Applies to: Fix WD passport external hard drive not showing up due to file system error or bad sectors.

If the system files are corrupted or the WD device contains bad sectors, Windows disk management may detect it as "*Others" or RAW. Your computer may not even able to detect it from File Explorer.

Qiling partition manager software with its Check File System feature can help. As long as your Disk Management can detect it, you can apply this tool to fix the corrupted file system and bad sectors on WD hard drive.

Free Download
Windows 11/10/8/7, 100% Secure

Follow to see how to fix corrupted system files and bad sectors on WD device:

After this, you can check the drive. If your files were missing, move to Part 3 and apply reliable data recovery software to bring back all your WD external hard drive data.

Fix 2. Add New Drive Letter to Make WD Passport External Hard Drive Showing Up

Applies to: Fix WD passport external hard drive not showing up due to the drive letter confliction.

If your WD displays as "New Volume" with no drive letter in Disk Management, it won't show up in File Explorer. Don't worry.

You can change or add a new drive letter so to make WD passport detectable and accessible again in Windows PC:

Step 1. Press Win + R keys, type diskmgmt.msc in the Run dialog, click "OK" to open Disk Management.

Step 2. Right-click on WD drive which fails to show up and choose "Change Drive Letter and Paths...".

Change WD device driver letter.

Step 3. Click "Add", set a new drive letter to assign to the WD external drive, and click "OK".

If the WD drive has already been assigned with a letter, click "Change" to choose another letter for it. After this, restart your PC and check if you can visit the WD external hard drive in Windows File Explorer.

Fix 3. Plug WD My Passport Halfway-in-USB

This method is more like a temporary solution. According to a user's feedback on a forum, in this "bizarre way", his computer successfully recognized the external hard drive. Here's how to do it.

Step 1.Plug the USB cable halfway through any one of your computer's USB ports.

Step 2.Wait for the WD hard drive to show up in File Explorer.

Step 3.When you see your hard drive, push the USB completely into the USB port.

It might be unreasonable, but quite a lot of people solved their problem with this trick. Have a try on it!

Fix 4. Try a Different USB Cable/Port or PC

When your WD hard drive neither shows up in File Explorer nor Disk Management, you can try to change the USB cable, try another USB port, or a new PC to see if the drive can be read or not.

Step 1.Switch a USB port/cable and replug it to your computer.

If the drive can be read via new a USB cable or on a new PC, then the drive is working fine. The problem is with the USB cable.

Step 2. Reconnect the WD drive via a new USB hub or to a new PC.

If the WD Passport drive shows up, it is the damaged USB hub that stops WD from showing up.
If the WD passport is not detected either on your current or the new PC, replace the WD drive with a new one.

Fix 5. Update WD External Device Driver & Reinstall BUS Controllers

When the WD Passport drive is not working, it might be caused by the outdated device drivers. So the best way is to update its driver via the following three paths:

#1. Download and Install WD Device Driver:

Step 1.Connect the problematic WD external hard drive to your PC.

Step 2.Right-click on the Windows icon and select "Device Manager".

Step 3.Find and expand Disk Drivers, Portable Devices, Universal Serial USB Controllers, or Other devices.

See if the WD external hard drive is shown as an "Unknown" device.

Step 4.Right-click on Unknown or not working WD external hard drive, select "Properties".

Step 5.Go to the Details tab, set Property to "Hardware Ids".

Step 6.Right-click the top Value and click "Copy".

Update WD device driver.

Step 7.Paste it into a browser and search for the correct device driver.

Step 8. Find and download the correct WD device driver and install it on your PC.

After this, restart your computer. And everything shall work fine with your WD My Passport Ultra drive.

#2. Update WD Device Driver from Device Manager:

Step 1. Right-click on the Windows icon and select "Device Manager".

Step 2. Expand Device Manager and right-click the WD My Passport Ultra drive.

Step 3.Select "Update driver".

Update WD device driver

Step 4.Select "Search automatically for updated driver software", wait for the process to complete.

#3. Uninstall/Reinstall USB Controllers

When the Universal USB Bus Controllers are outdated, it may also stop your WD passport from being detected or showing up. So you can try to uninstall and reinstall USB controllers:

Step 1.Right-click on the Windows icon and select "Device Manager".

Step 2. Expand Universal Serial Bus controllers, right-click on USB controllers of the WD drive, and select "Uninstall device".

Reinstall WD USB controllers to make it work again.

Repeat to uninstall each USB controller one by one.

Step 3. Restart the computer and Windows will automatically reinstall the USB controllers of your WD drive.

After this, you shall be able to visit and access saved data on your WD Passport Ultra drive normally by then.

Notice:: If the WD external hard drive is still not showing up in both File Explorer and Disk Management after trying all these solutions, send your drive for repair as shown in Fix 3.

Fix 6. Send "Unknown" & Not Detected WD External Hard Disk for Repair

If your WD external hard drive displays as "Unknown" in disk management, the last thing you can try is to send the disk for repair.

You have two options for this issue:

Option 1. Beyond the Warranty: Send WD external disk for repair in a local repair center
Option 2. Within the Warranty: Send WD external disk back to its manufacturer

Part 3. Get Data Off WD External Disk and Format It to Work Again

If your WD hard drive shows up and you can access the disk again. Take the last guide in this part to fully protect your files and make the WD external hard drive viable for saving and editing data again.

#1. Get Data Off WD External Hard Drive

Here are two ways that you can fully get files from your WD external hard drive:

1. Open and copy data from your WD hard drive to another storage device as a backup.
2. Recover lost files from WD drive with Qiling file recovery software.

Note that, if you lost some valuable files during the process, don't worry. Professional file recovery software can scan and bring back your files in 3 steps:

Step 1: Select file types that you want to recover

Download and install Qiling Data Recovery on your PC or laptop.

Free Download
Windows 11/10/8/7, 100% Secure

Connect the external hard drive to your computer.
Run Deep Data Recovery and choose Select file types that you want to recover. Then, click "Next" to continue.

Select file types that you want to recover

Step 2. Choose and scan the external hard drive

Choose the external drive from External drives list. Then, click "scan" for lost data.

select the location to scan for deleted files

Step 3. Check the scan results

Qiling data recovery software will immediately scan the selected drive for all data, including deleted, corrupted, and existing data.
You can use the Filter feature to quickly locate the files of one kind, such as Pictures, Word, Excel, PDF, videos, emails, etc.

Step 3. Preview and recover data

Double-clicking a file from the scanned results to preview.
Choose the files you want and click "Recover".
Select a different drive to save the recovered files instead of the original one.

Remember to save the recovered files to another secure location and then move to the next guide to format your WD My Passport external hard drive to usable again.

#2. Format WD External Hard Drive to Usable

Here, you may also let Qiling Partition Master help. It's easy and efficient in formatting a disk:

Free Download
Windows 11/10/8/7, 100% Secure

Step 1.Launch Qiling Partition Master, click the partition on your external hard drive/USB/SD card which you want to format and choose the "Format" option.

Format External Hard Drive/USB/SD Card - 1

Step 2. Assign a new partition label, file system (NTFS/FAT32/EXT2/EXT3/EXT4/exFAT), and cluster size to the selected partition, then click "Proceed".

Format External Hard Drive/USB/SD Card - 2

Step 3. In the Warning window, click "OK" to start formatting your external hard drive/USB/SD card.

After this, you can save the data back to your WD external hard drive again.

Make Your WD External Hard Drive Show Up and Work Now

On this page, we explained why is WD My Passport Ultra external hard drive not showing up on Windows PC and provided 6 practical fixes for you to follow and make the drive show up again.

As a beginner, we suggest that you follow the whole guide one by one. These fixes also work to resolve the same issue on all brands of external hard drive, internal hard drive, USB, or SD card.

Now, it's your turn. Take steps to fix your not showing up WD external hard drive and make it work again without losing any data.