External Hard Drive Recovery

TheGreatSatan · 06-August-08, 07:13 PM

Someone I know has a Western Digital 320GB MyBook that has recently died. It uses a power plug to power the drive and a USB 2.0 to connect to the PC. I plugged in the cord and the little light on the adapter turned on. I plugged the cord into the MyBook and the front LED's came on. When I plug in the USB cord, the computer doesn't see it. I've tried another USB cord too. It's not in My Computer, or the device manager. I'm going to try to take apart the drive and plug it in internally into a PC case next. Can you think of any other options?

Lokie · 07-August-08, 04:18 AM

You might want to try spinrite on the drive first, if it still fails. Then that is the correct path to test out the drive, hopefully the housing circuitry has gone bad and not the drive.

Spatha · 07-August-08, 10:41 AM

I have had drives simply not detect before, meaning they didn't show up on my computer or have that balloon pop up that says detected new drive. The only way I knew the computer saw them was to go into manage under my computer and go to Disk Management or you can just type diskmgmt.msc in the run prompt.

godling · 08-August-08, 10:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheGreatSatan


	Someone I know has a Western Digital 320GB MyBook that has recently died. It uses a power plug to power the drive and a USB 2.0 to connect to the PC. I plugged in the cord and the little light on the adapter turned on. I plugged the cord into the MyBook and the front LED's came on. When I plug in the USB cord, the computer doesn't see it. I've tried another USB cord too. It's not in My Computer, or the device manager. I'm going to try to take apart the drive and plug it in internally into a PC case next. Can you think of any other options?

I think the option you're taking is the simplest one. Spinright is great if you can detect the drive, but if you can't ... you're SOL.

-godling

TheGreatSatan · 08-August-08, 12:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lokie


	You might want to try spinrite on the drive first, if it still fails. Then that is the correct path to test out the drive, hopefully the housing circuitry has gone bad and not the drive.

Hopefully it is just the housing circuitry.

06-August-08, 07:13 PM		#1 (permalink)
TheGreatSatan Apex Tech Demi-God	External Hard Drive Recovery Someone I know has a Western Digital 320GB MyBook that has recently died. It uses a power plug to power the drive and a USB 2.0 to connect to the PC. I plugged in the cord and the little light on the adapter turned on. I plugged the cord into the MyBook and the front LED's came on. When I plug in the USB cord, the computer doesn't see it. I've tried another USB cord too. It's not in My Computer, or the device manager. I'm going to try to take apart the drive and plug it in internally into a PC case next. Can you think of any other options? Last edited by TheGreatSatan; 06-August-08 at 07:26 PM..

07-August-08, 04:18 AM		#2 (permalink)
Lokie Custom What?	Re: External Hard Drive Recovery You might want to try spinrite on the drive first, if it still fails. Then that is the correct path to test out the drive, hopefully the housing circuitry has gone bad and not the drive.

07-August-08, 10:41 AM		#3 (permalink)
Spatha Apex Tech Fanatic	Re: External Hard Drive Recovery I have had drives simply not detect before, meaning they didn't show up on my computer or have that balloon pop up that says detected new drive. The only way I knew the computer saw them was to go into manage under my computer and go to Disk Management or you can just type diskmgmt.msc in the run prompt.

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