WD elements desktop 2TB external drive is not recognised

[Prash_pp]

Hi All - I have a WD elements desktop 2TB external drive which used to work fine till about a month ago. I used to connect it to my laptop which runs on a Windows Vista (home edition). When I connect the WD now it comes up as "Unallocated" under Computer Management. I have data on the drive which is very critical for me so cannot lost it.
Please can someone help and advise how I can recover the data from the WD drive.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Welcome to the community, Prash_pp!

This seems very unfortunate. 🙁 If you usually use the WD Elements Desktop drive on another computer running a different OS version, it's possible that connecting it to the Windows Vista laptop could have corrupted the file system of the HDD. I'd recommend you to try connecting it back to either one of the computers that you've used it on and even try a different USB cable and a different port on the computer itself.

I'd strongly advise you to run WD's Data LifeGuard Diagnostics tool first and make sure that there's nothing wrong with WD Element's health and SMART status. You should run both the QUICK and the EXTENDED tests from the utility.

The corrupted file system would require you to use professional data recovery assistance or using some third-party data retrieving tools at your own risk.


Keep me posted with the troubleshooting, though!
SuperSoph_WD