External Hard Drive wont recognize!!

Discussion in 'PC hardware help' started by kingt22, Apr 23, 2009.

  1. kingt22

    kingt22 Member

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    First off let me start by saying thanx to all those who sit and reply to these threads to help others out for free.... Im a new member but i've been checking out the site for a while now. Ok. now to my issue. I was backing up my dvd's to a 1tb western digital external hard disk when I got a delayed write error message on the screen. Now when I try and connect the drive It wont show up in the my computer window. It will make the sound that a usb device is being plugged in, but nothing after that. I was just transferring files between drives(I have 3 now) when it happened so im not sure what went wrong.
    The Drive is formatted as NTFS with about 700gb of movie files that I definitely dont want to lose so reformatting will just kill me. I've tried looking into the device manager(read up on another forum osted here) to see if the yellow question mark would pop up but nothing. Please help all who can. Once again many thanxs to AD....
     
  2. ddp

    ddp Moderator Staff Member

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    have you tried it on all the usb ports of the pc? have you tried the drive on another pc to see if works or not?
     
  3. kingt22

    kingt22 Member

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    I've tried all ports on my desktop then hooked it up to my laptop and still nothing. The light on the drive will start flashing like its being accessed, but I get nothing else from it. It will make the beep sound when connected but it wont show up
     
  4. ddp

    ddp Moderator Staff Member

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    maybe the actual drive is good but the drive enclosure is bad. if not under warranty then take the enclosure apart carefully(just in case is still good) & connect the drive to the motherboard.
     
  5. kingt22

    kingt22 Member

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    Im not sure how to take it apart, there are no visible screws on the casing. If I do take it apart will I lose the data if I mount it as a slave in my desktop?? If you know of a link to remove the hd it would be appreciated, Its a 1tb Western digital my book essential external hdd
     
  6. kingt22

    kingt22 Member

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    First off many thanxs to ddp for taking time out of your day to help...thanx again
    .......so after 3 hrs of trying to get the drive to be recognized in windows explorer it finally went through the autoplay to read the drive. I just plugged and unplugged several times with breaks in between. There was no rhyme or reason for it working now as I didnt do anythng different then when it stopped working the first time. I thought an external hd was the way to go for safe storage but this incident has made me think long and hard.
    I have over 400+ movies stored between 4 different 1tb hard drives and losing any one of them would cause too much pain to even think about. Besides buying more hard drives to back up the ones I have, (which would cost more than $800 presently) what other alternative do I have for storage??
    Has this happened to anyone else out there?? What could be the cause?
     
  7. scorpNZ

    scorpNZ Active member

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    Yeah externals can be fickle things & some more than others,it would now pay to run a check disk scan on that drive since it was improperly dismounted,there's a small block of data the hdd has that gets corrupted by abrupt disconnects especially using write caching,anytime a disk including your comp should be shutdown like that it pays to run that utility to clear it

    You won't loose data it's still there,you just need to figure out where or how the housing was put together so you can install to another housing or the comp if you want to retrieve the data,it would also pay to set them up for quick removal,whether you dump write caching is over to you,i have with mine it just means i need to be careful when disconnecting them
     
  8. ddp

    ddp Moderator Staff Member

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    kingt, no problem. maybe windows just did a hicup causing the drive not to work temporarily or the external whether the case or drive might be dying.
     

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