Is is dead? (External hard drive).

SideWinder · 29 May 2015 at 14:52

Hi,

My mate's hard drive is suddenly not being recognised by his laptop so i tried it on mine. Windows recognises it when it plugs in and updates drivers but it isn't visible on My Computer.

Any ideas?

It isn't spinning so i am thinking not...

ED209 · 29 May 2015 at 15:34

first thing to check is in disk management and make sure its not assigned a drive letter that is already in use, if it is then you can change the drive letter and see if that works.

Philtor · 31 May 2015 at 08:07

Can you open the enclosure and try connecting it to your PC directly?

Boogieman_WD · 2 Jun 2015 at 15:04

SideWinder said:
Hi,

My mate's hard drive is suddenly not being recognised by his laptop so i tried it on mine. Windows recognises it when it plugs in and updates drivers but it isn't visible on My Computer.

Any ideas?

It isn't spinning so i am thinking not...

Hey there, SideWinder.

I'd have to agree with @ED209 here, so try this out.
You did well by trying the HDD on a different computer, but I'd also recommend that you try it with a different USB cable as well (not longer than 12"), to see if the same thing happens again. If the drive is not powered up, it shouldn't be recognized so you could also try to download the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic tool, to see if it recognizes the drive and test it, in order to find out what's the situation with it.
However if you need to recover data from drive - it would be best if you try that first. I'd recommend that you try accessing the HDD via Linux Live CD/USB to see if it recognizes the drive properly and if you can get to your files, or try with data recovery software to see if you have any luck.
As for @Philtor's suggestion - this is not an uncommon method if you have valuable data which you need to recover, but it's not usuallt recommended and should be done only as a last resort. Note that this wouldn't help if the issue is not connected to the external enclosure somehow, plus if the drive is still under warranty - you'd probably void it this way.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how everything goes.
Boogieman_WD