Faulty USB Drive?

[muso56]

Hi Guys and Galls,
My daughter in law recently asked me to look at her HGST (Western Digital) Touro 3TB USB storage drive as it was no longer being seen by her Win 10 Laptop. Checking explorer and diskmanager on it confirmed the device was not being seen. I Have since tried it on 2 further machines one with win 7 the other win 8 will no luck also. On both occasions checking dskmng as am aware that sometimes window's will find these devices but not assign drive letter and hence will not be seen in explorer.
This device which is only approx 1 yr old displays a blue light imediately it is pluged in to a suitable port. It appears that no drivers are required for this unit, software on installation is preloaded but appears to be of a proprietry nature. Has anyone experience of the above unit who can offer assist as have just been quoted £400 for data recovery!
Thanks,
Willy

 

[drkatz42]

a few years ago I took apart an external usb drive(having same problem as you) and found the drive inside to be a standard 3.5" hd. i connected the exposed drive as I would any internal drive and was able to copy the data. obviously proceed at your own risk.

 

[Viking2121]

If it's not reading at all in windows on device manager, that normally means the controller card went bad, it happens way more than you know, I run across this all the time.

First I'd try another USB cable and a Power cable if possible, if it still fails you can pull the drive out of the enclosure, be gentle with it as HDD's are fragile, You can hook it up internally to get the data off of it, Pretty sure its going to a sata based drive, even if its a laptop 2.5inch you can still do this with a spare sata cable and sata power. Or you can buy another enclosure, they are cheap these days. If it works in the enclosure then the HDD isn't bad and you could get another few years out of it.