External hard drive not recognized in Windows 7

[Vagenius]

Hello, I am in need of some help, or information, whichever would be great.

Ok so I have a WD My Passport external hard drive 0741A I believe. Well It worked fine a few months ago and I haven't touched it since. I usually keep it stored in a box in my closet with all of my important papers because the hard drive is only used to back up pictures and videos of my 2 daughters. Well I got it out to store some new things on it and it's just not coming up when I plug it into usb. There is no little noise when I plug it in letting me know that there is a device being plugged in BUT the drive seems to start up, it seems to be spinning, the light is on and it's not making any loud noises or doesn't sound unusual.

I checked in Device Manager and it is showing up under disk drives when it's plugged in. I tried to update it from there but it says the driver is up to date. Ok so I plugged it into my laptop and it made the little noise that it was being plugged in BUT when it went to install drivers it failed to install them.

I'm not sure what to do at this point so any advice would be appreciated. I have all of my pictures and most of my videos backed up online but there are a few videos that are on the drive and that's the only place I have them. I don't mind if I have to eventually take it to a recovery service because it is worth it to me but if anyone has had this problem or if it seems like it may be something I can fix on my own I'd love to know before I pay $300 just to recover some videos(it's worth it because it is my daughter but if I could fix it on my own it would me amazing.)


Alright so thanks for any help.

edit: I forgot to add that when I pull it up on WD Data lifeguard Diagnostic it is not finishing the diagnostic, it fails, it says something about a sector or something like that.

 

[Pako80]

You can try tearing it apart and connecting the disc the old fashioned way, if that doesn't help only then you should consider recovery service.

 

[Coolflame57]

I'm actually facing a very similar problem. I scoured the internet earlier and this one dude did exactly what pako80 said to do. He found that the SATA to USB connector had gone bad, and he connected directly to his motherboard via a SATA cable. This solved all of his problems. I used a screwdriver to pry up the top of the case and VERY CAREFULLY removed the hard drive. The case broke a bit, but it is fine. If you keep it connected to the motherboard directly via SATA, it will be faster than via USB.

 

[Vagenius]

Alright well I have a free diagnostic from a local shop happening tomorrow so I'll at least find out what's wrong. When I go to manage devices it's showing the hd as unallocated so I really don't want to mess with it much more. Something has obviously gone wrong with the drive and I'm really not sure why. I definitely am not going to reformat it though because well obvious reasons. I think that the partition needs to be recovered, I'm pretty sure it's a software issue because the tests I've done say the device is working properly, I'm guessing from a hardware pov anyways. If they want to charge me some outrageous amount of money I think I'll try file scavenger first. Has anyone used that program?

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there Vagenius,

I am really sorry that you are facing some issues with your WD drive.
I want to start with that you shouldn't take the drive out of the enclosure as the device is hardware encrypted. This means that you will not be able to access the data if the drive is out of the enclosure.
As the data that is stored on it is really important, I would say that your safest bet of recovering the data is to contact some data recovery company.

Apart from all this, as the drive appears as unallocated in Disk Management, it most probably lost the partitions. There are numerous threads in the forum of users with similar issues(unallocated external drive), that manage to recover the partitions with different partition recovery tools. Though, after the data is really important, it is up to you to decide whether you want to try that.

What did the DLG results say(it is good to run both tests)? Something about bad sectors may? It will not hurt to try something simple as just changing the cable as well as connect it to a different USB port and retest it.

In case you want to check WD's Data Recovery Partners out: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=nsCkqC

Hope this will help. Keep me posted on that.
D_Know_WD

 

[Gary_K]

My external USB drive was not recognized but appeared as unallocated in Disk Management also.
I assigned it a drive letter and it then worked normally. This has happened with
more than one drive.