WD External hard drive partially recognized, freezes everything

[Guest]

Hi, I have a 1 TB WD Elements SE Portable External hard drive. It was working perfectly until earlier. It was only being partially recognized by my laptop (Lenovo Win 7 64-bit). By partially, what I mean is:

1. It shows in my System Tray (Safely Remove)
2. It shows on Win Explorer but labeled only as Local Disk (G but without storage capacity details.
3. It shows in Device Manager > Disk Drives and USB Controllers

Strange things are:
1. Everything freezes when I try to scan, check and format it.
a. Win Explorer freezes when I right clicked on it
b. chkdsk, format, and other win commands return nothing but they work on other devices
c. Windows Disk Management, WD DLGDIAG and other softwares freeze when my device was plugged in, then will work fine once I unplugged it.

Do you have any idea on how I can fix my device and recover my files?

Thanks.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey Fae Czarinah Pajarillaga. Sorry to hear you're having such problems with your drive. Do you hear any unusual sounds/noises from the drive when it is connected? It's a bit odd that the HDD would behave this way though. Having in mind you've already tried most of the troubleshooting, I'd suggest that you also try it with a different computer to see if the drive behaves the same way. Unfortunately if you can't get it to work with a data recovery program and it keeps freezing the OS of every computer you try it with, probably there won't be any other option except for a data recovery company.
But as I said, try it with a different computer first to see what happens and run DLG again. If everything works out fine, you could try some of the solutions from this thread here for data recovery: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD

 

[ngrego]

That sounds like it could be a power issue. Portable drives will have that kind of issue if they are not sufficiently powered.
If that is the case, it could be caused by a couple of things.

One would be the cable, and the other would be the actual USB port it is connected to.
If the drive uses a single USB cable for power and data, try using a spare, those cables tend to degrade over time and end up not supplying enough power to the drive for it to work correctly. If you have a similar cable from an other disk try it out or if the disk has a second power cable use both.
In the second case, if you connected the disk when running on battery the port may not have the power to support the disk. In this case try the connecting the disk with the power connected to the laptop. If it was on power, try it on a different USB port.

Of the two causes I would probably think it is the first. I have seen this happen hundreds of times with portable drives. In most cases it is cable at fault.
Only in very rare cases is it the actual disk failing.