My Book Hard Drive Locked & Not Coming up on my computer

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

My 5.0 tb my book won’t come up on “my computer” area. It’s on my computers “my devices”. But it won’t show on WD Security or WD Drive Utilities. On-disk management it shows it but says no data for how much space is on it.

It was flashing white light. However during trying to fix this problem I’ve now put it in a hard drive docking station so no more flashing. Someone online said when they opened theirs they could see dirt on the circuit board and that ti might need cleaning to fix this problem, nothing was on mine. Perfectly clean and tightly connected.

It’s not making any usual noises and its spinning normally.
No problems with the hard drive before, no drops or power outages that we know of.
It comes up on the computer, the computer knows its plugged in but, I can’t get it to run unlocker or be recognized like it used to be. It was password protected. I feel like if I could get it to let me enter the password I could see what was on it. Before this happened it appeared like it was in good health.

Other things I’ve done to fix it

  1. Change USB/Power cord to new ones
  2. Different USB port on computer
  3. Uninstall driver, update driver
  4. Change Letter paths
  5. Now I’m using a hard drive docking station
  6. Use EaseUS Data Recovery (Shows as a disk but when I try to “recover” nothing ever happens it just estimates time
2

Hi,

You may download and install WD Discovery Tool to unlock the drive.

https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/20814

3

same issue here with my 9 year old My Book Essential (WD10EARS-003BB1), VCD drive no longer shows and i can’t unlock the drive to access, and migrate the data off to a new My Book 4TB Desktop drive. i know the drive is getting old, but its been used all the time for backups etc and i have the same one in my office, it still works fine, and tested my home one on my office desktop recently, and its definitely the VCD drive not working, had same access issue. Wanted to migrate data before the old one failed (too late me thinks!)

I had my system doing my monthly W10 updates, and when done it restated and hung at the Gigabyte bios screen. had to remove the USB 3 My Book in order to boot, and now tried connecting to 3 different systems, and none of them can see the Unlocker app. WD Discovery sees the drive, but Security app sees no drive and Smartware (has invocation fault, and been removed and reinstalled), plus Device Manager sees WD My Book 1130 USB Device, but disk wont initialise.

Any ideas how to fix to rescue my data?

4

After what felt like endless troubleshooting I just dropped it off at a repair place. Will update. I didn’t want to make it worse and chance losing my data.

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