External WD hard drive disaster!

PeterT · 1 Oct 2007 at 17:36

Hi, a colleague has a WD my book external HD. On plugging it to her comp the drive is recognised and XP installs the software but you cannot access the data on the drive. The comp even says the drive is running normally. If you click on the icon in My computer it just keeps doing the egg timer symbol and the blue light on the drive keeps on going round instead of being static. The icon has lost its name from what she called it. Exactly the same on other machines. I have changed the power supply and it is exactly the same.
It has the overall effect of slowing the comp down as well until you pull out the usb cable. Exactly the same on firewire.
She has not been using the drive as a back up but as the only place to store her work and has no other back up!! Disaster, as you can imagine.

All ideas gratefully welcomed!

PeterT

WarBird · 1 Oct 2007 at 18:03

probably needs formatted or something

be option is to take it out of the enclosure, put it inside the case and run it and make sure it's working at least

PeterT · 1 Oct 2007 at 18:03

Just been thinking, as the drive is out of warranty would it be possible for us to open it up and bypass the usb/firewire bits and just treat it as an ordinary hard drive so it could be plugged into the computer with an IDE cable?
Are the WD book drives SATA or IDE inside?

Cheers, PeterT

mattyfez · 1 Oct 2007 at 19:34

yes, just remove the hard disk from its caddy, then it can be used in the same way as a normal HDD.

Bin Boy · 1 Oct 2007 at 19:38

Okay heres my 1 penny, i had the same problem with a External WD drive where i had backed up data on the 500GB notebook, in the end i had to reformat the drive and back everything up again, not much of a back up solution that turned out to be, i only have the harddrive on once every six months for just to back up with.

So my guess to my problem which might be the same has yours is that it must have been a windows update for Exterrnal drives, thats the best i could think of but there was something not right about it at the time.

I tryed everything to access the drive but couldn't think of a way, everything was telling my from windows the drive was there but the data was not.

** I just connected my notebook right now to test if i could access the files (first time in months), windows first did a Autoplay check for all the files and the drive showed up in my computer window and i can access my files.

So i would put it down to windows for my problem, but is deffo the same problem your having.

PeterT · 1 Oct 2007 at 21:35

Thank you for all your replies, we will try and get the drive out tomorrow. This could be interesting as there are no obvious ways in to the my book enclosure!

PeterT