My external hard drives will not start?

I ran a business and stored a significant amount of information from my Mac on two WD external hard drives. Three years ago I closed down my business and went through a series of moves. During these moves my two hard drives stayed packed away in boxes. These boxes were always inside my house and were never exposed to extreme heat or cold.

I now need to retrieve information from both hard drives, but neither is working. I have tried them on both my mac desktop and my mac laptop, they don’t show up on either on my desktop or when I go to disk utility. The front light on both lights up white, not blue, and there is no sound coming from either of them. One has a spinning sound inside for a moment when I plug it in, but that only lasts a few seconds.

I really need to get this information, how to I either get my hard drives to work or get the information off of them?

This is most unfortunate. Did you try replacing the interface (USB/Firewire) cables? If the units are still within warranty then WD Support is able to provide you with a different power adapter in case there’s a power issue. If not, then another alternative would be to contact a certified data recovery service company for analysis.