Ext. HDD detected but not accessable

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

Hello everyone,

Earlier yesterday, I formatted my computer. After that, my everything was in Ext. HDD. I started to get things from it. I got most important things firstly and I said I’ll resume it later. Process was done and so I was not doing anything with ext. HDD. After that I dropped external HDD by accident and disconnected the usb cable… I wanted to make sure if its still working after the drop so I reconnected it. PC detected my ext. HDD but it did not appear on ‘My Computer’ and ‘autorun’ did not show up. HDD light was always bright and when I connect it to PC I hear the sound. After million tries, just for one time a ‘autorun’ showed up and it appeared on ‘My Computer’ but I could not get my stuff from it because I could not open any picture/music/document on it, it stopped working. But it was saying 700+ gb left in it so I was pretty sure my stuff still is in it.

After that I checked few things and realized it shows all disk ‘unallocated’ How can it be possible, I opened it once? I formatted my PC Disk C and it did not work after that, too. So my main question is, how can I solve this problem without losing and picture/video/music/document in it? I really need everything in it. All my 4 year work is in it. Hope we can find a way. Thanks a lot.

Note1: Should I try to take actual disk out of the case and plug it in via SATA to motherboard? Can it be a solution? (maybe case is damaged but the disk inside is fine?)
Note2: I read something, if I don’t overwrite it I may have chance to recover the data from it. Is that true?
Note3: I’m thinking to send my ext. HDD (WD 1021: too old) to WD service in Turkey (if there is) Can they solve it without any loss of documents, thank you.

I don’t really care about Ext. HDD to work but I need all of the stuff in it. Thanks again.

With my all respect;
Yigas

2

I’m sorry you’re going through this, but a dropped hard drive usually results in internal component damage.

  1. Unlikely to work. Most WD external units are designed to work with the original enclosure, and could have a native USB port. It is unlikely to be detected by your system.

  2. Data recovery is best handled by a professional, certified company. Additional information is available in the following link:

  1. Physical damage voids your unit’s warranty, and even within warranty WD does not perform data recovery services. Only replacements.
3

Trancer;

First of all thank you for your reply.

I’ve just solved the problem. As I told, I did format my Disk C and D, before that I get all my stuff to D and then to my Ext. HDD. So, I bought EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard and did a deep scan to my Disk D (after the format I did not put a lot of stuff in it so it was not overwritten) : results are almost perfect. I did get %80 of my files back. Just could not get little things. I paid for it but somehow I solved it so, it’s worth it. Thank you again for your help :slightly_smiling: