Unable to find external hard drive on my computer

[Stacey_chantal]

Hello, I'm not a computer wizz by any means so please excuse my naivety here. My old laptop stopped working a while ago and when I took it in, they transferred all the data from my internal hard drive onto an external Serial ATA 2.0 hard drive for me. When I got a new laptop (changing from a Microsoft Vista to a Microsoft 8) I was initially able to plug in my external hard drive and access all of the stored information just like normal. Unfortunately I have since tried to plug in my external hard drive and suddenly it no longer works. My computer makes all the right sounds when I plug it in and even starts to initialise but then it just doesn't show up on my Computer. I have checked that it has a letter assigned to it and it does. The only place it appears however is in administrative tools but it shows as having no media and all of the options for it are greyed out. Any ideas on what has happened to suddenly stop it from working and more importantly, any ideas on how to get it working again? I still have the original internal hard drive so would it be better to just take this in again and get the data transferred across to another external hard drive again? Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hi Stacey!

What do you mean by "administrative tools"? Try changing the letter, sometimes the problem where it says that there's no media might be solved by doing that. Otherwise if your old drive and the data on it are still intact, I'd advise you to use it in order to try and retrieve the valuable files you have on it.
As for the external drive, try it with a different cable (preferably shorter than 12") and a different computer, to see if the same thing happens. You should also download the manufacturer's diagnostics tool and test it, to see if anything out of the ordinary pops-up. Note that any kind of testing or scanning should be done only after you've recovered all of your files from the old drive. This is necessary, because if you have to resort to the external HDD, you want to make sure that it's not further damaged by any scans or tests.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how everything goes.
Boogieman_WD