My WD 1040 My Book Esstential 3 TB drive has stopped being recognized on any source. PC, Smart TV etc.I’s a fairly new purchase from a local Wal-Mart, but always had power connection issues and now even with power connected and the light blinking, and the hard drive spinning, I am unable to retrieve or see any of my files on it. I an not really informed on the technical terms regarding this, but really need to get back my photo files that I stored here as my external back up.Can I assume the drive has crashed and what can I do recover those files. I even got a Imateck docking drive 3.5 SATA HDD and it still won’t recognize this drive or read the files. Admin Chkdsk will not recognize it either. It will show in the device manager with 0 in population and can be ejected. Any info would be greatly appreciated…and remember I am not tech savy, so if you can please spell it out for me. Thanks J
I had an older WD external drive and when it quit working, the first couple of times I would run “disk repair” on it, it would tell me that the hard drive is failing. I was able to copy some, but not all, files from the drive onto my computer hard drive before it failed completely. Once it has failed, you can’t run the disk repair application because the computer no longer recognizes the hard drive.
I also am not that tech savvy; I’m just speaking from my experience. I could not retrieve anything from the hard drive once it failed. I also got mine from WalMart, and you say the purchase is fairly recent. Mine was about 2 years old when it failed but it could be that you got a defective drive. If you drop it or knock it over while it is running (and sometimes when it is not running) that can damage the drive.
If the drive has failed, as it seems to indicate that it has done, there is no way that I know of for you to retrieve the files. My cousin kept all her professional photographs on a portable hard drive & dropped it. She sent it to a company who charged about a thousand bucks to retrieve the files, and they told her that the damage was too severe to help her.
Thanks Thomas, You are describing my situation to a tee. I ran the chkdisk fix drive once and everything returned okay and then we had a storm related power outage while I was using that drive. It has never worked or been recognized since…but still spins like a normal hard drive in the dock station or back in it’s book frame.
