I have been using about a year and half and it stopped showing in my computer last week. I tried the power cord and the USB - both are working and the drive does come on. It is not the drive, my computer troubleshooting says it has the best drive. It is appearing in data manager and in disk manager. In disk manager it is showing as unallocated and I cannot assign a drive letter. I really need to recover this data - don’t really care to use the external hard drive again. Any recommendations on recovering the data? I have taken into a computer technician, and they tried take it out of the case and use it in the computer and were unsuccessful. They said that WD has a security system that has encrypted the data and it is not accessible.
There is data recovery software like Recuva http://www.piriform.com/recuva that is free. Many software makers like EaseUS have a try and buy option where you can test and recover small amounts first. If the drive is just corrupt then Testdisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk might fix it. You can try downloading and burning a Linux Live CD and boot from that it sometimes allows access to data.
Joe
