western digital external hard drive blinking light

[sodastereos]

so i looked for years all over the internet for a fix for this problem i was rready to trow the old hard drive away couldnt get it to work or show up on windows at all. like it was dead.after years i had an aha! moment, had been experimenting with linux for a while so i downloaded" linux mint" distro so i could make a usb bootable version of linux on my w indows pc low and behold when i booted the pc of the linux mint distro the drive showed up on my screen and with all of its contents blinking light stopped.there is info videos how to make usb bootable version of linux mint with out having to instal it on your pc - hope this helps people since there is no info online on how to get around this problem - pass it on to people on other sites since my english is not very good

 

[DR_Luke]

This probably isn't fixing your drive issues, but just allowing access to the data in a different way that doesn't involve windows getting locked up. It is possible that the drive has bad sectors and possibly weak/damaged heads and is a ticking time bomb. Make sure you backup your files, verify that they are 100% good and then run some hard drive tests (Western Digital should have some software for this) to ensure that the drive is indeed healthy.