[imdiggingahole]

Hello all,

I have a Western Digital 320 gig external hard drive, and an Acer Aspire 5600 notebook PC. They were working wonderfully together, but recently my PC has completely stopped recognizing my hard drive. It doesn't even recognize that there is a device plugged in at all. The usb ports are all good, and the usb cable is good. I tried plugging the hard drive into another PC, and it was not recognized there either. Western Digital support has not been very helpful (they just told me to send in the hard drive since it is still under warranty, which I would rather not do, since I have a lot of stuff on there! ). Any ideas? Thanks.

Adam

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It's possible that the drive itself is okay, and that the problem you're having is due to a malfunction of the interface circuitry in the enclosure. You can probably take the drive out of the case and install it internally to test this theory, but I'm betting this would void your warranty. If the drive is bad, how much data you have on it is irrelevant. Unless you have several thousand dollars, you're not going to be able to get your data if the drive isn't being seen by your computers.

If WD is recommending that you send it in, that may be your only option. I'd try connecting it to as many different computers as I could. If it's not recognized by any of them, it's either the drive itself or the interface circuit.

[jeffk813]

It's possible that the drive itself is okay, and that the problem you're having is due to a malfunction of the interface circuitry in the enclosure. You can probably take the drive out of the case and install it internally to test this theory, but I'm betting this would void your warranty. If the drive is bad, how much data you have on it is irrelevant. Unless you have several thousand dollars, you're not going to be able to get your data if the drive isn't being seen by your computers.

If WD is recommending that you send it in, that may be your only option. I'd try connecting it to as many different computers as I could. If it's not recognized by any of them, it's either the drive itself or the interface circuit.

[happyrock]

FWIW...this can happen if you disconnect the external usb drive without using the safely remove icon in the system tray...can also do it to flash drives