Pls help, external hard drive problems

J

jack76son

New Member
Hello all, newbie here, glad to be a member.

I have a 500gig WD usb external hard drive that is a few years old. Now whenever i plug it into my laptop (or any of the 3 computers at work, this same issue keeps happening. The drive shows up in the bottom right toolbar, so i can safely remove, etc ... but no drive letter is assigned, and it doesnt show up in 'my computer'. When I display device components in the safely remove hardware menu, it even recognizes it as a WD external device .... and when i click properties in this menu, it tells me that the device is working properly. When i go to the volumes tab, and try to populate it i get
Disk: unreadable
Type:Unknown
Status:Unreadable
Partition Style: Not Applicable
Capacity:0mb
Unallocated space:0mb
Reserved space:0mb

Snooping around, i found a computer management fix, but that doesnt recognize it either. It is recognized in device manager, without any error, and it cant find any better drivers for it. I have tried the power supply from my laptop (luckily its the same style), and used a different usb cable.

I have a couple thumb drives around here at work, and they all work, so i believe that it is narrowed down to the external drive itself.

I dont know what else to do, and would really like to recover these files. If you need any more info, i'd be glad to provide you with anything else i can.

Thanks
jack76son
 
Thx twinbird.

I tried to uninstall the drivers for the ext. drive, and reinstall, but not the others. I'm stuck at work right now, and the work setup doesnt allow me to do any windows updating, (which suuuuucks) so i'll have to give it a go when i get home, in a weekish. I will post the results as soon as i can.

In the meantime, is there any other ideas?

Thx for the help, everyone
jack76son
 
If reinstalling the drivers doesn't work, you'll probably have to partition and format your hard drive which should get it working again, although you'll lose all your data. You could try recovering the data first by taking the hard drive out of the case and hooking it up to your computer.
 
I've had a hard drive case's chip stop working before. I agree that you should take it out and hook it into the computer. If it works ok, you could buy another case for it for cheap.
 
Result:

I finally got home, and caught up on other things and got around to getting a hard drive enclosure today. The exact same thing is happening, so i assume that it is the drive itself.

Is there any other options to get at that data? Or am i screwed?

Sorry for taking so long, work has been crazy, and thank you for the assistance.
 
You have to check first your system before purchasing it. Try to connect it with some other system. If it work fine there then problem must be with your system or you need to replace the external drive.
 
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