Why cant windows access my western digital external hard drive

[steph0319]

Hello,

I have a WD external SATA drive that cannot be accessed by my computer. When I checked the partitions it shows as a healthy active drive, but the disk is not accessible. It shows that it is full but won't allow me to open it. It also says that the disk is corrupted but I don't understand how it could be. (I have had ext drives crash on me and this is different.) I have downloaded the software for WD and the tests ran on the drive pass and show that it is ok. I have tried restarting my computer, renaming the drive and everything else I could think to try~ to no avail. Any suggestions?

Thanks!
Steph Owens
www.stephowens.com

 

[alvine]

right click on the drive you are trying to access
go to tools and run error checking utility
let that program do its work and then you should be able to access your drive

 

[steph0319]

Thanks Alvine~ I had tried that and though it showed no errors it wouldn't let me in. I had my computer guru take a look at it and from what I now understand if you fill it to capacity Windows will sometimes lock you out of the drive rather than just not allow you to add more things. He basically had to run a recovery program on it and back it up to a new hard drive. crazy! But thank you for taking the time to reply.

Steph