WD 1TB external drive

[joma0414]

Please help me with my WD 1TB external drive. Once I plug it in my laptop, it just continues to read until my laptop hangs. I can't access the drive; important files in it. Please help. Thanks, Jojo

 

[Ralston18]

Have you tried another known working USB cable?

Does that happen if the external drive is plugged into another laptop or some other computer?

Does that happen if the external drive is plugged into another USB port on your laptop?

You need to take a look at what is going on during the "continues to read" process.

Couple of options available:

Look in the Event Viewer logs for errors. The logs are overwhelming but generally once past that you will quickly get a sense of what they can show you. Look for errors, warnings, etc..

You can use the Performance Monitor and/or Task Manager via your laptop to check on what applications, services, processes are running.
Open one or the other and watch for a while. Then open the other and again watch. Then plug in the WD 1TB drive and see what else starts happening.

You might see some process taking up all of the memory. Or all of the CPU time. Make note of the name, what it is doing etc. Then that can be researched for a possible solution.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there joma0414,

Sorry that you are facing some issues with your WD drive. 🙁
As Ralsten18 already suggested, you can try using a different cable. You can also attach it to a different system.

In case the issue persists though, my guess would be that the drive is failing.
One thing you can try is to boot up Ubuntu from a CD/flash drive/another external and try to access the drive. Ubuntu seems to handle better HDDs with bad sectors. Here's a thread on that: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/267999-32-recover-data-mode
If this does not work, I guess you can try using some data recovery tool for DOS. You can try some OS based ones as well but there is a possibility that your system will hang again. Here's one: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html

After you retrieve your data, you can test the drive with WD's DLG(both short and extended tests) tool and see what is wrong with it: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=BGoG56

Apart from all this, keep in mind that in case the data is crucial, your safest bet for recovering it is to contact a data recovery company. You can check WD's Data Recovery Partners out: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=dbNNnw

Let me know in case you have some more questions,
D_Know_WD