I purchased a My Book ED 500 gigs about a year ago. It worked perfect until yesterday night, when the hard drive stopped working.
When I plug it in, I can hear the disk spinning as it usually does (sort of like an engine revving), but after 30 seconds the disk stops spinning and turns off.
ive been search online for answers, someone said it could be the power adapter so i purchased another one at the local electronic stories. that didn’t help at all and the problem remains.
i’ve contacted western digital through their phone service but ive been on hold for the last hour and a half.
outside of data recovery, what else can i do? someone said freezing the hard drive for a couple hours, then plugging it could get it to temporarily work - or just enough time to save very important files, but im afraid it could irreversible damage the drive.
I had a similar problem with a drive even older than yours. It was not a Western Digital drive, but it was an external drive (1TB) formatted as NTSC for Windows.
The solution I found (at techspot.com’s forum) allowed me to copy hundreds of gigs of data from that older external to a new one before the older drive became unusable. *Please note: my experience doesn’t mean that your drive will also become unusable… But this may help you, even if it isn’t a lasting solution:
1.Turn your computer off, then:
a). unplug the USB cable;
b). unplug the power to the drive.
Restart your computer, **and disconnect your computer from the internet;
b). Turn off your antivirus.
Plug the power into the hard drive.
Wait 10 seconds and then plug the USB into the computer. ( This clears the hard drive buffer ).
See if the drive shows up in disk management.
**Note: The original steps I read did not include disconnecting from the internet. I added that because the original poster said to disable any antivirus programs; but it is only truly safe to disable antivirus program(s) when one is not connected to the internet.
The original poster also said that after following the above steps, he “had no problems [afterwards].” I can’t quite say the same, because as I said above, my drive eventually crashed. But the above steps did enable me to copy about 98% of its files to a new drive before I could no longer access them.
