This drove me crazy for a long time. I have a few wd passport external drives which worked fine with windows 7 as identified on many posts. Though as indicated previously they CAN work on windows 8.1 RT.

They will work as a normal drive as long as you do not have a password on the drive. The wd software will not work on windows RT, but the drive will work as normal, if there is no password on the wd drive. Use a computer with out windows RT on it and remove your password. Then plug it into your surface with windows RT.

Hi guys, I have a problem on my WD My Passport Essential 500gb. It is working on my other PC(Windows XP) But here in my Windows 7 Ultimate it will not initialized. Mac os high sierra. I also tried to change the Drive letter but the options is disabled. Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, Windows 8.1 64-bit, Mac OS X 10.10, Linux Mint 17, Windows 10 Pro TP. WD My Passport Essential Not Detected. (Western Digital My Passport 1TB external HDD USB3) or this one (Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1TB external HDD USB3) and what is the advantages and disadvantages of both h.