How can I re-use a WD MyPassport external drive

[stevepicma]

I want to re-use a 1TB WD MyPassport external HD as a backup for a new W10 laptop. It has not been used much as I never found the WD software to be very usable. It shows on my laptop as “Drive D: WD unlocker” as having 24mb used and no free space, the 24Mb being mostly an unlock.exe file, a formatting.exe file and HTML documents.

It won’t reformat and shows up with Paragon HD manager as a 930Gb disk labelled WD My passport 0740 USB device. I used Paragon to reformat it and it now reads 930 Gb unallocated. However Windows still shows it as before, a 23 MB drive with no free space, plus one one occasion an empty Removable Drive E, which then says there is no disk in it.

How do I get it to be just a single empty drive I can use like any other? Nb. Please note although I used to be familiar with partitions etc and disk activity so understand the basic concepts, that was a LONG time ago...!WD disks.jpg

[Max Power]

You need to create partition on it --

launch CMD as Admin
diskpart
list disk
select disk 2 (if it was Disk 2 in the list)
clean
convert mbr
create partition primary
exit


Then reformat it using Windows tools (Explorer window should offer to do this)

[Saqio]

Thank you for a detailed instruction. I have a 1TB WD MyPassport in my property in Rome and I wanted to use it as a backup too. Now I will try step by step and hope that it will work. Thank you once again!