I have a Western Digital 1TB My Book external hard drive, that has worked fine until lately. I think that I may have a faulty drive, and am just wondering if you guys think so too. When I plug it in it works fine, but if it is disturbed the slightest bit it disconnects, and last time I plugged it in it repeatedly connected and disconnected until I just unplugged it. Should I start backing up the stuff on this one? Thanks for the help.
IF you can get it to connect at all, try connecting it, then shaking the USB cable. If it still works, shake the power cable. If it still works, then you probably need a new HDD case (or you can probably just install it inside the computer if it is a desktop system).
Is it the home edition? (with 2 firewires and 1 mini usb and a eSATA port) If it is try a different connection I use the eSATA connection and it works fine.
95% of all external HDD failures are either the cable, power supply or enclosure, not the drive itself. Try a new USB cable and if that doesn't fix it, try a new enclosure.
Guys can I weigh in here with a question of my own? I used to do tech support at a fairly standard level for a few years but switched careers about 4 years ago - it doesn't stop friends asking me for help with their home Pc problems. My friends external 500 gig Seag*te external USB harddrive seems to have gone kaput! I said I'd have a look. Plugged it into 2 different PC's but it wouldn't get recognised. Disk was spinning away but no connection (same issue)... So that eliminates a problem with the PC. Next I took the drive out of the enclosure but I only ever worked with drives with IDE ribbon cables (not the new smaller hard drive heads/cables) & had no PC with the new version... Brought it into work & found a PC with the same sort of connection. Tried to initially connect the drive as a slave on the PC but no joy & also tried to straight up boot off it but the BIOS didn't even recognise it. My question - is the drive totally trashed or should I try bring it to one of those centres that offer data recovery (or can I download something to do this myself???). Normally I'd tell her to get over it but it contains all their recent honeymoon photo's... Cheers...
well, if the HDD was correctly installed in the system then it should at least show up in the BIOS or it's a dead drive. Another case of "Back it up!"
Yeah Sam - I gave it to my former self (end user support lad in the office) & he hooked it up to a PC which had the more modern internal IDE cables. It didn't get picked up as an additional drive while booted off another HD or didn't get picked up as a boot drive. Pity as I wanted to do a good turn for a good cause... Cheers for the speedy reply.
Cheers - Yeah I just read up on it. It looks decent exceot that external devices can't be powered by it yet...Good for the internal harddrive world & maybe the larger external HD's with power supplies. I'm going off the mark here.... Cheers again!!! Back it up!!!!
You can't power external devices off IDE either... Also, S-ATA has been commonplace since 2004... I believe Gigabyte are experimenting with a hybrid S-ATA combined power & data connection.
