Hello, I have a huge problem with my 1 TB external hdd. So I’ve had this hard drive for quite a long time maybe 3-4 years… It’s been working great until I would say almost a year ago … I tried fixing it before but I just gave up but now I realised that I need to access it so I can copy my data to another hdd i have. Now here is what happend. Out of no where one day I turned on my pc and i started seeing weird moving lines on my screen… It’s really hard to explain but it looked like my screen was flickering. So I tried everything to see what the problem was and I decided to unplug my external hdd just to see if somehow thats causing it so I unplugged and guess what… that was the problem. I had no idea why I was getting those lines everytime I plug my hdd but at least I found out what was causing it… Shortly after that I realized that the same hard drive wasn’t getting recognized. So after doing research for weeks and weeks, after trying every possible solution nothing worked so I just gave up… One thing i forgot to mention is that when I plugged the same hdd to my dad’s pc it worked flawlessly, no weird lines on his screen and it was recognized/working like a charm… but at the time I was really busy and didn’t really need the data that I had saved on my hdd so I didn’t bother moving it… So today i decided to try again and see whats up because I have most of my music on it so I wanted to copy it to my new WD 4 tb external hdd… So the same thing happend, the same weird lines appeared but the weird thing is that the hard drive appears for a little bit and then when i try to access it it disconnects in couple of seconds… so I went to my dad’s pc because I know it was working before. I plugged it in and there were no weird lines again so I was happy knowing it will work and I will copy my data but no. First of It took like a minute to get recognized and when it did it kept disconnecting making it impossible to copy my data because the minute i try to copy it it disconnects… the same thing happens if i only turn it on without touching it… it will work for 30-40 seconds and it will disconnect … so it’s not only when I try to copy my data. Now again I tried everything possible that I could find on the internet to fix it and nothing works… It seems like the hard drive is working because the light blinks, I can hear it spinning, and I can clearly open it and see that all my data is there… oh and one thing i forgot to mention is that after couple of tries of me disconnecting it and plugging it back in it started to say “In order to use this HDD you have to Format it” … that also appeared while ago when I was trying to fix it… I don’t want to format it because obviously I need the data… I could care less about the HDD I just need my data It will be greatly appreciated if any of you can help me .Sorry if this thread has been made multiple times before, but I looked through a lot of them and felt like no one had the same exact problem like me so I had to make a thread about it. Thanks in advance, Aleksandar!
Hello
Welcome to the WD Community.
Although you said that you tried multiple things, did you tried changing the physical connections? Power supply if is a desktop unit and USB Cable.
If is the desktop version, make sure that you connect power supply to the wall outlet.
Yes i tried using my dad’s cable and power supply because he has the same WD hard drive … but that did nothing And I also tried the wall outlet plenty of times too…
With the help of WD’s customer service we found out what the problem was, for anyone that has a similar problem… it was the AC adapter… WD were kind enough to send me a new one for free Thanks guys!