As of last night my 1TB External HDD is no longer being recogized by windows, the wife accidentally disconnected the USB cable while data was being transfered to it from a laptop. Since then, it doesn’t show up on the My Computer screen. It shows up in Device Manager simply as WD, I uninstalled it from there and installed it again, have rebooted several times and have powered the HDD down and back up again numerous times as well. When looking at it through Computer Management, it is listed as unknown and not initialized, I know it’s that one because in the properties it is listed as WD and the only other two hard drives are the laptop’s internals and those are listed and working fine. When I right click the WD drive (which has no assigned drive letter anywhere I am able to see it) and select “initialize” I just get the incorrect function error message.
Anything I can do without reformatting it? How can I get it to show back again under My Computer and have it be recognized? Every time I plug and unplug it, the notification sound is made, but nothing else.
When I ran HD Tune 2.55, the software showed me all three hard drives, the two in the laptop, and the external, the external was labeled as WD (2199GB) , it doesn’t let me do the benchmark test (Read Error! Test Aborted) and when I ran the error scan it said that all blocks were damaged (all were red) . When I ran undeleter 2.55 it doesn’t display the external hard drive, so I Can’t try to use that program .
I understand your situation and use these un-destructive method to recover your drive.
HD Tune Pro is required to test external drives properly. But you can always recover bad hard drives using HDD Regenerator 2011 and Active @ Undelete Software. Trial versions may give you a clue whether you could recover your drive using their tools. For complete recovery you may have to buy them or look on the bay.
Good Luck… take it easy…. I am sure you’ll recover your drive without any data loss unless it is a hardware fault.
Mabikay – SLK
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