Hi everyone . I have an external hard drive that was working up until today . I plugged it in and it is not recognized . Not sure if it is a minor issue ( I sure hope so ) or not . Any suggestions or tips would be greatly appreciated. Running vista , worked seamlessly up until this point and don't see that anything happened to make the issue occur. Thanks.
External drives do fail frequently which is why I usually have two of them .Backup to the backup if you will
WD is a den of crooks, the "warranty" is to..buy another one from WD if the original drive is under "warranty". They have the gall to call it a "customer loyalty program"...when you can find the same drive cheaper with a simply Google search. WD is the "new" Zip Drive, only at least those things will give you the click of death, WD just fails out of the blue, they do offer a diagnostic tool, which if it finds your WD external drive no longer works..it recommends you buy a new WD external HD.
Sometimes windows doesnt assign a drive letter to the HD. Try a third party program that can recognize the drive. I use Paragon Partition Manager.
Two things to try out. Highlight Computer or My Computer (I'm on W7 so I don't remember Vista) & select Manage & go to Disk Management & see if the system see's the drive. Or you can try selecting Properties instead of Manage & go to device Manager then do Do a scan for all hardware changes. You could also try other ports but I have a feeling you already have. Another thing to try it on another system if you have one or use a family members or friends system. Let's say you are lucky & get that HDD to be recognized, the first thing I would do is a Scandisk & repair all bad sectors. Double click on Computer then right click on the HDD > select properties > tools > error checking > make sure you select both boxes. In the future if the files are VIP then I would suggest a backup of a backup like CT suggested. It can get costly but you can never put a price tag on VIP files that you can't recover.
Will see , so far I don't see it being recognized at all . Have to check the brand name . Another question , if it is "toast" can you open the drive up and use or save it? or pretty much all that is on there is gone? Thought it woud be a good option to store my photos and some other things , I will lose some of the photos ( I have lots as it is a hobby and I do it both for enjoyment but also as a paid hobby at times ) ... Back up back up it seems huh? Thanks all.
Dead as a door knob Bro, if that is the case, I looked and looked and guys were trying crazy things like putting the platter on a different HD, replacing the transistors, nothing worked. I leave mine unplugged now and only plug it in after a short prayer to the almighty that it does not die as I have no way to migrate all of the things on it.
