[landa321]

I've had this external WD drive since Black Friday. I didn't even start using until January and now it's not showing up in disk management or windows explorer. I disconnected my external disks to re-organize and when I re-connected, they all worked except for this one.I left the computer on and came home and saw that it was showing up in my windows explorer, but then I started going through it to make sure everything was fine and it stopped working.

I connected to my laptop and it didn't show up there either.

It shows up in Device Manager as "WD". I tried disabling and then enabling. Still nothing.

I tried Control Panel> Administrative Tools> Computer Management> Disk Management and it does not show up there at all.

I tried installing Tweak UI. Clicked on My Computer> Drives and all letters were checked.

When I plug the drive in, I do hear it spin very quietly for a little while. No clicks.

The letter assigned to this drive was M, by the way.

i tried a different USB cable, same result.

That's about all the info I have.

I'm running Windows XP.

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Are you quite sure it's not listed in 'Disk Management' as a volume with no drive-letter assigned to it?
If it is shown as such, you only have to right-click the volume and select "Change drive letter and paths", then pick an unused letter from the drop-down list.

[phillipcorcoran]

Are you quite sure it's not listed in 'Disk Management' as a volume with no drive-letter assigned to it?
If it is shown as such, you only have to right-click the volume and select "Change drive letter and paths", then pick an unused letter from the drop-down list.

[landa321]

yes, I am quite sure.

[happyrock]

do you use the safely remove icon in the system tray before disconnecting the drive

[landa321]

I usually do, but unfortunately, this time I did not.

[happyrock]

I usually do, but unfortunately, this time I did not.

unfortunately if you don't use the safely remove...you have killed the drive...its been my experience that you can not even slave it to another computer and see any data...(this is also true for usb flash drives) your only option would be to send the drive to a data recovery company where they disassemble the drive and take your platters out and put them in a new drive enclosure with a new controller board and other hardware then recover any data they can...its real spendy

Edited by happyrock, 16 April 2010 - 08:46 AM.

[landa321]

do you think it is guaranteed that I killed the drive? how do you know for sure?

[happyrock]

take the drive out of the enclosure...slave it to a working system...
does that computer see the drive and data...no...then its dead...
want to be 100% certain...take it to a local computer shop and have them test it for you