i bought my wd 2 tb hard drive a month ago. it was working fine but suddenly my laptop didnot recognise the hard drive. i have changed the USB cable but still its not working. is there any solution to this or i have to go to the store.
Try this…
1) Make sure your disk drive is visible on Device Manager. > Win Key + R then type devmgmt.msc >expand disk drive and your drive should be listed there. (Check the model #)
2) If not listed; you have a dead or badly connected drive. Cannot continue!
3) If drive is visible > Win Key + R then type diskmgmt.msc > your drive should be listed on Disk Management.
4) If Drive letter is not assigned to your drive, right click on your drive and assign new drive letter W to your drive.
5) If not listed, shut down your PC.
6) Disconnect all USB drives and AC power cable or battery and adaptor cable if it is a notebook.
7) Wait for 2 min. and reboot. Your drive should be should be visible now.
thanx for your reply i followed ur step up to no 4 but i cannot select any thing on right click. the only thing it shows is properties and help. there is disk in disk mgmt but says unallocated, unknowm and not initialised. what should i do next. can u reply please. thankx for ur attention.
Unallocated/Not initialized/Unknown words are not good signs. You’re about to lose or already lost your data for good. At this point you should be able to initialize the drive by right clicking the drive header. After initialization you may have to repartition and format the drive. This will destroy all your data. These steps should be used as a last resort to recover the drive and it will be blank.
Before this try these two utilities. One is Testdisk Free (Google) for it. (Read the info on the relevant site). This might able to repair your drive.
The other is HDD Regenerator 2011 (Google) this is a shareware and try using the trial to scan and repair (Read the info on the relevant site). If that can repair your drive it’s okay. Otherwise you need to buy the full version. Remember; drive recovery takes long time, sometimes it may takes 10 to 12 hours to complete one stage.
If all fails, you’ll need to return your drive for a replacement.
Good Luck
Mabkay, I think you have me on the right track. I’m using a HP G60 Notebook with Windows 7 and a WD800B008 External HD.
I am able to see the external under disc drives in device manager and also under printers and devices. When I go to Disc Management it does NOT have a drive letter. It is lited below with the CD-Rom and shows it as “Basic” and “Unallocated”.
It gives me an option to convert to Dynamic or MBR, but was not able to assign a drive letter. I have years of photo’s and data which I would like to recover if possible, please let me know your opinion. BTW, it was working fine with my WinXP desktop, before it crashed…
Thanks
Update: I was able to assign a drive letter (W), but it tells me I need to format disc…
Since you were able to assign a drive letter, just don’t jump to format option right now. Have you tried either TestDisk or HDD Regenerator 2011? They might able to recover lost partitions and bad sectors. Give it a try if you haven’t done that already. If these two utilities cannot recover your drive to original state, you may have to format your drive in the end.
If you elect to format, get in to disk manager and delete existing partition(s). Then create new and format quick with NTFS. (Don’t use normal format option as some WD drives run in to trouble while doing this. - Really don’t know why.) It happened to me once or twice.
