WD Elements 2TB not showing up

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

Hi,

My WD Elements external drive (type WDBWLG0020HBK-04) has worked fine for several years.
But since about a week it does not show up in Windows (or anywhere else).

My main desktop computer now has Windows 11, but the disk also does not show up when I connect it to a laptop running Windows 10.

I even tried connecting it to Ubuntu, but also nothing there. So all computers seem to agree upon not showing the drive. Like it has some invisible bit set that prevents it from showing :frowning:

What could prevent an external USB-drive from showing up?
Because all computers I connect it to donā€™t seem to recognize it.

When I connect the drive the drive to the USB port it ā€œboots upā€.
The light on the front goes on, so everything seems fine.
But the disk is not showing anywhere, not in Device Management and not in Disk Management.

What I already tried:

  • I just bought a new USB-cable to connect the drive to the PC (but it is still not showing)
  • Open Windows Device Management and disable Power Management for USB Root Hubs (then reboot PC)
  • Install WD Discovery software (says ā€œNo usb device connectedā€)
  • Install WD Drive Utilities (but it does not recognize the drive)
  • Install Western Digital Dashboard (but it does not ā€œseeā€ the drive)
  • Install additional disk management / recovery software for Windows (but they do not see the drive)
  • Use Nirsoft USB Logview: USBLogView - Records the details of any USB device that is plugged or unplugged into your system (plug / unplug of the drive is not detected by this software, but when I plug in / unplug other devices these events do show up)

Is there some lower-level way to detect the drive on USB?

Can I dis-assemble the drive and connect the hard disk in another way to a computer?
That would be a last resort for me, but when everything else failsā€¦

2

Yes ā€¦ have done it myself with a couple of drives and a friend of mine recently did it with several WD Elements (he bought a 4 Bay JBOD and put all his Elements drives in it ā€¦ data was readable)

Elements have no data encryption so, it makes it easy to remove the Internal Hard drive (which is a standard SATA, with a USB interface board See Picture below) and either put it in another External Enclosure or directly to a desktop PC via SATA +Power

Personally, i would recommend doing it to determine whether the problem is the Enclosure or the Hard Drive itself.

I hope itā€™s the enclosure ā€¦ because that is easy to replace.

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