My 1TB WD external hard drive is not showing up under MY PC. Device manager is showing it but I can't access it. Can you help?

[kumarchatterjee]

My 1TB WD external hard drive is not showing up under MY PC. Device manager is showing it but I can't access it. Can you please help?

 

[Chickenator]

If this is a new drive that you recently installed, then you have to format it to see it.

Since it's simply too much to write for me right now, just use this guide, which i used myself: http://www.pcworld.com/article/248980/how_to_format_your_hard_drive_in_windows.html

However, if it has suddenly dissapeared, then you could open up the case and check if all your cables are fully plugged in.

 

[kumarchatterjee]

Thanks for responding. Well, unfortunately this is not a new one. I'm using it for the last two years. It had more than 930 GB of music — something I gathered through the last 10 years — and it is not easy to have a backup for such a huge volume of stuff. If I need to format the drive, it would be a huge loss for me. I got in touch with one of the professional agencies. They estimated the cost at $2000. The shocker drove me to explore avenues if I could do something on my own but there are several software options that promise to retrieve data from crashed hard drives. Can you suggest me what would be the best option or options that I could rely on? The HDD is Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB USB 3.0 / 2.0.

 

[Chickenator]

I personally haven't tried any PC file recovery programs, but i've heard that recuva is pretty popular and a good one.

You could use this tutorial and see if anything matches your problem: http://lifehacker.com/5982339/diy-data-recovery-tricks-for-when-your-hard-drive-goes-belly-up

 

[Frontlines]

Can you give us some pictures from Device Manager and Disk Management?

 

[Cyo4567]

For me, it was to go to Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management, which was showing the external drive. Even though it had a healthy partition, I had to remove it, and add a new volume. The disk instantly came up in the Computer folder.