WD My Book Essential Drive Failure - Help please....

[shelbyman]

Guys...I've owned a WD My Book Essential for a couple years and when I plugged it in to my laptop tonight, the drive was not visible and I could not get to my data. Also, the external hard drive was making a low scratching noise.

Should I try software to recover my data, do you recommend I take the drive to a PC store for recovery or are there other options.

I've read through this thread and I'm not certain what the best, easiest course of action is to save my data??

 

[digitaldoc]

Your drive, from the noise you describe, sounds like a goner.

http://lifehacker.com/5951822/how-can-i-recover-data-from-a-dead-or-erased-hard-drive

The above link goes through some options for you. Your local PC store cannot usually help with this as a cleanroom is needed.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there shelbyman,

This noise most probably indicates that your drive is dying. Sometimes, bad cables could results in HDD weird noises but I doubt this is the case. You can try attaching it with a different cable anyway.
Apart from that, I would say that your safest bet of recovering your data would be to contact one of WD's Data Recovery Partners: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=5Bkmxa

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD