I have a USB 160GB Western Digital Passport drive that I use for backups of my system. It's a great little drive that I just plug in, press 'Sync' and it updates itself to be a complete copy of my system at home - perfect.  It has many other uses - but that is all I need from it.

I plugged it in recently to update it but all I heard was that dreaded hard-drive click.  After trying the few usual things, restarting etc.. I resolved myself to that fact that it may have died. Unusual - but possible.  I was quite disappointed.

Thankfully, Western Digital (www.wdc.com) have a good website with a support section full of help, drivers, and diagnostic tools.  Luckily, I had nothing on the drive that I haven't also got elsewhere, so downloading the tool to format the drive and formatting it was no problem for me - other than the fact that this made it worse.    After downloading the diagnostic tool and running that I managed to fill my drive with 'Zeros' - apparently - which now made the drive unrecognisable from Windows.  I was ready to bin it.

Back to WD website and further searching. I then found a formatting tool that creates the partitions required for correct functionality.  Hmm, looked promising.  The drive must be seen by windows as a CD-drive, or similar, that does not natively give access to the rest of the drive space.  Access to the drive space is then controlled by an app that site in this partition.  It was kill or cure at this point.

This worked!  I now had a small partition visible and writable from within Windows.  Back to the website and more downloading, this time a Synchronising application.  Copy this to the small partition and run.  Perfect.  All working.

Well done Western Digital.  Good support website, good resources and helpful help.  My drive is now functioning again - (although I will never store data on it that doesn't also exist elsewhere).