Once again I am faced with another offending WD Elements 1TB that for some reason lost its ability to show properties or even drive capacity. It shows up on Windows Disk Management as a Basic Disk with no storage capacity and wont allow you to format it.
Normally, apart from the site support page, the best solution to problems lie in forums where the problem had already been discussed to length. And to that end I was trying to use Acronis True Image WD Edition but the program hangs whenever it tries to interact with the device… this program requires a WD drive connected to initialize and somehow the offending drive is able to do so but thats the extent of that.
As a sort of last resort, I reverted to the HP Disk Storage Format Tool which really can format anything (it formatted one of my drives before, unintentionally) and it was able to see the full size of the Elements drive as well as eventually format it to FAT32 restoring functionality. I returned it to my boss who then reformatted it to a MacOS system and is now receiving data as its supposed to.
In the past I have bought a WD Elements drive but when the glitch happened I didnt bother with the HP tool or any other format tool because I was not able to use it outright so I had it replaced with a Passport.
With this experience somehow my trust on the Elements line has been returned and am now more confident giving the go ahead when someone asks me whether or not the Elements is a good buy, I used to keep telling everyone to spend some more and go for the Passport line; the Elements, after all, is a tad bit cheaper and with a more squarish utilitarian form.
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