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Thread: Using 2 My Passport Essential drives on single PC

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Apr 2012
    Posts
    10

    Using 2 My Passport Essential drives on single PC

    I am using a Windows 7 Ultimate Operating System and was using a WD passport essential of 500GB since 2-3 months. Till now it is working ok without any issues. I have recently bought one more WD passport essential of same make and even it is running fine on my system. Both are working fine when I am using it individually and have no issues what so ever. But just day before yesterday I tried to connect both my WD Passwords and to my surprise only one was recognized among them. It was difficult to understand why it happened. I again reconnected them one by one and they were working fine again. I had connected my WD passport to the computer in my office where I use Windows 7 Essential. Can this be the cause of problem. I am unable to understand why this happened.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Jun 2011
    Posts
    869

    Re: Using 2 My Passport Essential drives on single PC

    Most of the people encounter this problem because of drive conflict while trying to connect to multiple external hard drives at the same time on a single computer. Sometimes it may happen that one of your drives goes offline and so it is not visible. It is not a big issue and it can be resolved in some simple steps. Just follow the further set of instructions and that’s it you will be able to access both your external hard drives. First connect both the External Hard Drives. Right click on “My Computer” and select “Manage”. From the Computer Management window look for “Device Manager” and open it. Double click on the “Device Manager”. It will show you Disk connected to your system. Check that both are listed in this. If not then you will need to re-install them. Check that they are not in offline status.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Jun 2011
    Posts
    467

    Re: Using 2 My Passport Essential drives on single PC

    This can be a problem of Disk Signature. Disk Signature is actually an identifier for the disk set by the Windows operating system. You can use a command line utility to view and change the Disk Signature. The steps to change the Disk signature are as follows:
    1. As you are using a Windows 7 operating system open cmd in admin account. Or else you will not be allowed to make any changes from other account. Right click on the cmd.exe file and click on “Run as Administrator”.
    2. Check the title bar of the command prompt whether you are running it as an Administrator. As I said earlier opening Administrator command prompt for performing this action is very important.
    3. In the command prompt type “diskpart” and hit Enter.
    4. This will start the Microsoft DiskPart with a “DISKPART>” prompt.
    5. To list the all Disk those are connected to the system, type “list disk” without the quotes.
    6. This will list all the disks connected to the system but it won’t have usual names you will have to recognize them looking at their sizes. It will list the size of actual physical disk and not the partitions that you have created on the disk.
    7. Now you will have to select the disk to view its signature, type “select disk a” to view the signature, here “a” stands for the number of the disk, you have to note down this number from “list disk” display. Once you have selected the disk, DiskPart will respond by telling you which disk you have selected.
    8. To get the disk signature type “uniqueid disk” and press enter, it will give you a series of hexadecimal digits.
    9. To change the signature, type “unique disk ID=NEW SIGNATURE”, where new signature is the new Identifier that you want for the disk. This will change the signature of your drive and it will not clash with any other drive.
    10. To quit the DiskPart, type “exit”.

    Just remember that every command has to be written without quotes and you will have to press enter after every quote. Hope this helps you in connecting both the external drives to your system and working on them.

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