Desperately seeking help with 2tb external hard drive

Hi,

I’ve seen a lot of these kinds of posts in my search for answers but none are quite on the mark with what I’m experiencing.

I have a 2tb external western digital hard drive. It was working wonderfully until one day I got a message pop up on my laptop saying “device drivers stopped working” (don’t know if it’s related or not) and from there on in my hard drive was not detectable. On any machine. With any cable. 

Device did not show up in my computer nor in disk management.

That was a few months ago, I left it just in case one day some computer genius would walk into my life and fix it. No such luck, so last night I had an urge to try again - after maybe 15mins of being plugged in, the drive did actually show up in my computer! Couldn’t open it up, however. It also showed up in disk management as inactive, and I couldn’t do anything with it as it kept popping up with an I/O device error.

Today is very similar, only I have been able to open folders up to see my files are still on it, however I am unable to retrieve them. Disk management also shows it as healthy, primary partition. However opening folders does lead to a “not responding” or further I/O errors. So not been able to retrieve my data. There are photos on there etc that I really would like back.

If anyone can help with this I will be forever in your debt!!!

Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

Try a different USB cable and see if that helps. Make sure it’s not longer than the original and don’t use a hub.

Joe