I have WD EXternal Hard Drive 3200MEA. I have been using this for over a year now with no issues. Tried accessing some information over the weekend and couldn’t do that. I can still see the local hard drive icon appeared in My Computer foldder and the light is still flashing on the actual HD. Even I can hear the sound of HD running however can’t open the drive to access anything. After a while the message pops up asking for drive to format before it could be used.
Any suggesstion to troubleshoot this, much appreciated.
What OS are you using? Look in Disk Management and scroll down to where it shows the drives as bars what does it say there? Did you try moving the USB cable to a different port?
If it’s asking you to format it then it’s corrupted, if it’s not that bad then Recuva, TestDisk or PhotoRec should help you with that. Format the drive later and get a second drive to start backing up your data, don’t leave it alone on a single drive while you push your luck.
also, make sure you’re using safely remove hardware before pulling the data cable. as a matter of fact, you might try another usb cable to make sure that it hasn’t been damaged. just make sure that the cable is not longer than 18 inches.
