Cannot access Elements SE USB 2.0 WDBABV0010BBK

I lost the cable for my Elements SE USB 2.0 WDBABV0010BBK. I bought an alternative on ebay, which is not an original part.

When I plug it in, the light on the disc is on (solid) but the Mac says it cannot access the disc and offers Eject or Ignore, Disk Manager can’t see it and nor can DiskWarrior. I can’t even format it (not that I want to - I want the data…).

So my question is: is this because the cable is not right (or subspec/substandard)? Or could this also be an unrelated crash of some kind?

Without the original cable I’m not confident of where the problem lies.

The cable could be bad or the data might be corrupted. For the correct cable you can contact tech support and if the data is corrupted you can download a data recovery program like testdisk.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk