WD Elements 2Tb Not recognizing laptop!

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1

I have a WD 2TB Harddisk and it was working fine, my son connected the same to play a movie in Playstation since then the Harddisk is not been getting recognized in any laptop, not sure my son formatted by mistake!!

how do i get access to my hard disk? can anyone help me pl.

2

if your son connected it to a PlayStation 4 and it prompted to format the drive for use as “Extended Storage” then a few things have happened …

  1. The drive is now formatted and partitioned for use with PlayStation 4 … this erases all previous data / format and partitions on the drive.

  2. Windows or iOS will not recognize PlayStation 4 formatted/partitioned drives … they MUST be re-formatted and re-partitioned for use with a PC to recognize them again.
    (Done in Windows via Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management)

After all that … it MAY be possible to recover your data via data recovery software or services …

BUT, be prepared for the worst if the data was valuable and you had no backup.

3

Thanks so much for your help, yes am assuming its formatted now!! I think, I would have completely lost the data, unfortunately i haven’t taken the back up!! my bad …

mine is Windows, i have tried till Disk Management, but after that, i have no choice of giving the path or adding a additional Drive name, so unable to move further.

can you pl let me know, after Disk Management, it only showing as DISK 1, but has not giving any options which is useful. and my options here are " New simple volume, New speed volume, New stripped volume, Convert to Dynamic Disk, Convert to MBR DISK or Properties.
so if possible will you pl let me know the steps ? appreciate you help.

4

@mvj Look at this link for WD Elements and maybe you will find something that will help you.

5

To get your Windows PC to recognize the hard drive again … New Simple Volume is option to choose to format / partition a hard drive for use with your PC (this is the No.2 step as i explained in my previous post)

Note: If your son has moved any of his PlayStation 4 games to the hard drive … the above procedure of creating a New Simple Volume will wipe ALL PS4 data from the hard drive.

Note 2: Once your PC sees the new ‘blank’ hard drive … this is the time to attempt a data recovery either via software (google data recovery software) or via data recovery services.

Note 3: If you attempt data recovery via software you will need another Hard drive (typically the same capacity if the original hard drive was full … eg. another 2TB to recover the data to)

Whatever You Do, Once the Hard Drive is recognized again on you PC … DON’T write/copy ANY data to it ! as this will reduce you chances of any data recovery … if it’s at all possible.

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Thanks so much, this helps… appreciate your support…