My WD External Harddrive 2tb won't open!

I’m running windows XP sp2.  About 2 days ago my Western Digital External Harddrive (2TB) started blinking a lot.  I went to click on the icon in My Computer and after a minute I got an error saying “F:/ is not accessible Error Performing Inpage Operations”.  The icon shows up in my computer but freezes the My Computer window when I click on the F drive icon.  I plugged it into another computer running the same OS and it too had the same problem. 

I have an older 1TB WD-EX HD thats about 2 years old and I plugged it into my computer using the same USB port, cable and power cable and it loaded up fine.  I’ve scanned for viruses and I’m clean.  I can hear the WD drive starting up and it isn’t making any weird sounds.  Also I checked my Device Manager and it recognizes it.  I seriously have no idea what happened and I have an enormous amount of data saved on this and really do not want to reformat everything if I don’t have too or pay for data recovery.

If it helps I’ve noticed the light on the front of the HDD is constantly blinking.

Can anyone help me with this? I’d really appreciate it!

Ok, well thanks to yahoo answers I was able to solve the problem.  Hopefully someone will be able to read this and solve their issue too.  What I did was I downloaded a linux OS called Ubuntu.  It runs within Windows XP so it wont conflict or replace anything.  You just need at least 10GB+ of free space on your C drive to install it.  After I rebooted I selected to boot into Ubuntu.  I then was able to open up my EX HD thus allowing me to then transfer all my data over to a new EX HD so I can then reformat the orginal HD without any loss of data.  I hope this helps anyone out there with the same issue.

1 Like

Thanks for posting I’ve often wondered if Linux running from CD would work for data recovery. I could never get anybody with problems to try it. I’ve experimented but not on a problem drive.

Joe

It worked for me on an internal.

I had a drive die on me.  If the drive was connected via SATA, Windows wouldn’t boot – it would just hang at the splash screen.  Disconnecting the drive allowed Windows to boot normally.  DLG wouldn’t run on it from DOS – the drive would disappear as soon as DLG tried to look at it.

I booted with a SystemRescue CD (as suggested by another helpful person around here).  The drive was visible/accessible in 'nix – sometimes.

I managed to copy the data off it (in many sessions… the drive would work for a while in 'nix and then up and disappear while files were being copied – took about a week to get everything off it).

Glad it worked for you too.