I have had my Western Digital external hard drive for over a year now and everything has been fine. That is, until last night when I went to access it. The computer kept locking up. I thought a reboot might fix it, but that didn't help. It shows up in the device manager but not in the my computer window. I've also tried plugging it into different usb ports just in case the computer was being a pain about which one it was in. Even tried uninstalling/reinstalling it several times. Still nothing. It shows up in the safely remove hardware, too. I thought maybe a windows update caused the problem, but I did couple of different system restores and that didn't fix it either. Any ideas as to what could be going on?
Could be the actual hard drive, if it has failed, then the PC will still recognise a USB Device is attached, but can't read the hard drive. This would cause it to freeze your PC when trying to access it. Any funny grinding noises coming from the hard drive?
did the external come as is or did you put in the hd into the case?? if you assembled than take drive out of case & put into computer to see if recognized or not & see info on drive
It clicks as soon as I power it up, but not for too long. It came as an external drive. I'm pretty sure that it is shot and needs to be replaced.
is it still under warranty? if not might be able to remove the drive from case, set the jumper on it to master or slave depending on which ide cable you hook it up to
The warranty ran out in November. Of course. Would I randomly need to change it from master to slave/slave to master out of nowhere?
opposite to the other drive that you put sick hd onto, so if master present change sickie to slave or vice versa if no master but slave present
I'm using this with a laptop, so no changes have happened with that hard drive. I looked to see if I could open the case and there are no screws. Apparently it is one you have to pry.
you didn't mention you were using a laptop as the external hd might be the 3.5" for regular towers instead of 2.5" for laptop
No might to it. It is a standard, off the shelf external usb 2.0 hard drive by western digital, meaning 3.5". If I am understanding you right, you are suggestion that you need a 2.5" external for a laptop? It has been a long day and I'm not sure I'm getting the point of the last comment.
because drive is a 3.5" than can't try inside of laptop as it uses a 2.5" drive. my external drive is a wd 2.5" hd in a usb2 case that i assembled
I know that a laptop hard drive is only 2.5". At no point in time did I ever want to put my external drive inside my laptop. It hasn't been taken out of the case. When I tried it on my roommates computer I plugged it into her usb 2.0 ports. When you have an external drive to suppliment a laptop, it doesn't have to be a 2.5" drive. People that typically go for these need them to travel with them and it is more convienent to travel with a smaller drive. I don't tote my drive around so size is not a matter for me. Standard size drives tend to be cheaper too. If that wasn't the case I would have just gotten a huge drive in my laptop to begin with. Now that I've gotten that tangent out of the way, I've decided to just buy a new hard drive and put it in my own external enclosure (with fan) and be done with it. My brother-in-law is going to open the messed up hard drive's enclosure and put the drive into his desktop next time I see him to see if anything can be salvaged off of it.
if you had mentioned you had a laptop i wouldn't have said try the drive out of the enclosure in your pc. but as your brother inlaw is going to try it than, you'll find out whether it was the case or the drive was the problem but still get the same results as to what is good or bad, thats all. post what the results are.
Ah. I was just going to apply the stick it inside a computer to someone else's desktop. It will be 10 days before I get to go home from school. I'll keep you posted. Thanks.
