[SOLVED] Hard drive randomly stopped working, spins up but not showing up in explorer, disk management or BIOS.

[adisease]

My relatively new hard drive has completely stopped showing up in explorer after I was blowing dust out from inside the tower with compressed air while the computer was shut down. I made sure it was properly connected and even reseated the connections but that didn't change anything. It does seem to spin up when the computer turns on but it stops after a few minutes from what I assume is inactivity. I also tried looking for it in disk management and BIOS but it's not showing up in either of those. I then tried removing it from my computer and putting it into an external drive enclosure and plugging that into a different computer and just it does the same thing where it spins up but wont show up in file explorer or disk management. It seems to spin up fine with no weird sounds or anything but it quickly spins down again. When it's in the enclosure it sometimes spins up randomly but stops after about half a minute. I've read a couple of other threads of people with similar issues but none of their solutions worked for me.

 

[Ralston18]

Compressed air: what did you use and how was the air applied?

Did you try swapping out power and data cables with known working cables?

Carefully inspect plugs and ports with a bright flashlight to look for signs of damage.

Make and model hard drive?

Have you tried testing the drive via the manufacturer's diagnostic software?

 

[adisease]

Compressed air: what did you use and how was the air applied?

I used a normal large 116 psi piston air compressor connected to an air gun. I held down the fans while i was blowing it out and I blew from about 1-2ft away. I never actually blew anywhere near the hard drive bay though, I was mainly aiming at the graphics card, cpu cooler fan and exhaust fan.

Did you try swapping out power and data cables with known working cables?

Yes, and I also tried plugging it into an external bay and plugging that into a different computer and at first it didn't show up but now it comes up in disk management as "Dynamic Invalid"

Carefully inspect plugs and ports with a bright flashlight to look for signs of damage.

There is no visible damage that I can see. I did notice that whoever installed this hard drive used a molex adapter to power it which is something I have heard is dangerous, but it doesn't seem to have caused any visible issues. I did swap the power connector to a normal SATA 15 pin power connector though just to be safe.

Make and model hard drive?

WD Blue 1 TB (WD10EZEX) manufactured in 2018.

Have you tried testing the drive via the manufacturer's diagnostic software?

I couldn't find any Western Digital diagnostic tools but if there is one please let me know

 

[Ralston18]

WD diagnostic tools:

https://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?DL