Help! Lost access to my external hard drive...

wmac850 · March 18, 2013, 01:32:49 AM

I was doing some printing from Adobe reader and it froze my laptop. I did a restart on the laptop and noticed I couldn't access my external hard drive.

Did a little checking and noticed that the drive shows up on the "Control Panel>All Control Panel Items>Devices and Printers>" but doesn't show up on the Windows Explorer tree.

Any ideas? Just had a Windows Critical update a couple of days ago but when I did a reset restore it didn't help.

milky · March 18, 2013, 01:39:42 AM

What happens if you right click on Computer (My Computer) > Manage > Disk Management. Does it show in there?

wmac850 · March 18, 2013, 01:59:10 AM

Good day Milky:

Shows as "Disk 3 Unknown Not Initialized"

Device Manager it shows "WD My Book 1130 USB Device"

Device Status shows "The device is working properly"

JustMe · March 20, 2013, 02:12:43 AM

Sorry to say... I hope you have a backup of the data on the external hard drive. Sounds like the drive died.

Disk management saying to initialize the disk means that the MBR (master boot record) of the drive is gone/not readable and needs to be re-created. You have no choice but to initialize the disk so that the computer can access it. If there are no I/O (input/output) errors at this point, then data recovery software may be able to recover your data. If there are I/O errors, then the drive has physical errors and the only way to recover your data is to send the drive to a data recovery center.

milky · March 20, 2013, 04:21:25 AM

I believe JustMe is right, but, just for giggles try a new, GOOD quality USB cable. I have a couple of cheapie cables around here that give some grief from time to time. I'd also try it on a different PC, if you have one, in case it is something weird with the drivers on the PC you are using.

wmac850 · March 20, 2013, 06:17:08 AM

Thanks for your input gentlemen.

I took it into a repair shop and the tech opened up the case and low and behold a short circuit on the board and evidence of arcing on the case side near the board. Tested the motor and it spun up with no noise suggesting there's probably no platter damage. The only thing I could think of was....there was a power surge Sunday afternoon. Yes, I have every electronic thing on surge protectors but I guess the one which the drives were on wasn't quick enough. Going to change that one for sure.

The tech jumped on the web and found a new replacement board for the Western Digital model I have. Should be here the middle of next week. The tech will install then check to see if this resolves the access problem as it's pnp. Failing that....it's off to data recovery where they will have to swap out the platters or some other method. After all, there's quite a lot of work into the 18,000 plus tracks of music (recording to mp3, tagging, and turning into ots files).

Once again, thanks guys. We have a heck of knowledge base here on this users group.

JustMe · March 20, 2013, 04:20:02 PM

This is why I prefer "portable" external hard drives such as the WD Passport rather than the "desktop" style drives like the My Book. The My Book requires a separate power cord while the Passport draws its power through the USB cable. I've had 5 WD My Books over the years and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM HAS DIED. I currently use 6 WD Passports for my work and they all work - the oldest one is now 5 years old.

Jammin' Adam · March 20, 2013, 10:56:12 PM

Gee, wish this thread was around a few months ago, I have a 3TB My Book I bought when my old PC died to copy the drives to it. I don't use the software with it and it's rarely being used. Just a backup storage device.

Hope I at least get a few years out of it.