WD external drive won`t work please help!

Jericho.u.k · 12 May 2018 at 19:46

Hi all
I recently moved house and somehow my external drive is no longer working. I really need to try and fix it as it had a lot of things on it that I need to access. Basically I have 1 port on my pc where it seems to respond a little but all the other usb ports I get nothing. In the 1 usb port I just get the windows usb connection sound repeating and the light flashes on the drive for a split second but I cannot even feel the drive moving at all. The drive is the 1 in the link.

https://www.bing.com/images/search?...608006799765933026&selectedIndex=2&ajaxhist=0

Hope somebody can help and thank you for any help in advance

Jericho.u.k · 12 May 2018 at 20:13

EssexBoy said:
take drive out and connect to motherboard

Is this possible then. I didn't realise it could be so simple as it uses a different kind of connection to the back of the drive and also needs a dc power cable.

Jericho.u.k · 12 May 2018 at 21:09

Thanks bud ill give this a try tomorrow.
I have built a bunch of pc`s before so will be straightforward. I just thought the external would be somehow different inside......doh

Jericho.u.k · 13 May 2018 at 15:05

Update: I stripped the hd from its external casing and mounted it in my pc. In windows under disk management it says the drive is not initialised there is no drive letter or file system but it see the make and size of the drive. I cannot initialise it as this will format it and I need things from it. I am about to run wd diagnostic tools.

Any further ideas guys?

Update 2: wd diagnostics say the drive is in perfect health bar nothing shows under allocated space.

I don't mind losing the drive if I can only transfer its contents once.

Jericho.u.k · 15 May 2018 at 19:37

Thank you for the reply sasahara.
I really think this is the problem as I have tried many recovery options and the most anything can find on the drive is jibberish rubbish.
I am out of ideas and also gutted as there was a lot of stuff on it that I needed

Jericho.u.k · 17 May 2018 at 22:11

APM said:
May be worth re-assembling the original drive and trying it on a linux system.

Update: Good news guys, I put the chipboard back on the drive and reconnected the original ports on it but didnt bother with the outer casing. To my suprise it had full power but the pc still could not see it. I found and used a fantastic piece of software called Testdisk and the bundled qphotoerec and between them managed to both read all the contents of the broken drive and write them to my pc. The only downside is i have to go through 484 files full of random items to find the stuff i want lol (trust me thousands of items in these files)

So in the end a great result and thanks to everyone who offered help.