WD2500ME external HDD not recognized :(

[Dhiman]

To all Tech Gurus,
I need your help. I lately connected my WD external to a Windows 7 64 bit OS and since then my WD external drive is not recognised in my 32 bit Vista ( laptop).

Also, i connected to UBANTU 10.10 , its the same

what am i supposed to do now ? I have all my thesis data in there (
Kindly help to restore my HDD.
Cheers !!
Dhiman

 

[Mark56]

This seems to be a fairly common problem with a multitude of solutions, try these two to start with on the laptop.

In vista disk management, when it says the disk is not initialized there will be a little red arrow on the disk icon on the left of the unallocated space. Right click on the little red arrow and select initialize disk.

You could also try shuting down the Vista laptop and disconnecting the battery for 30 minutes then reboot and plug the external drive back in.

Is the drive still OK when using Windows 7?

 

[Dhiman]

Hi Mark56,

The situation is :

1. Its neither showing in Disk Management
2. Nor in "Hidden drives" in device manager & "problem devices"
3. Cables is fine
4. I tried to check with "Win_Dlg"
5. When i first connected the HDD it showed "Installing driver" in vista & "this device can perform faster" but no plug & play "Ding-dong" sound, after that its dead, no more message from Vista since then.

I also followed your instruction & booted after taking off the battery for 30 minutes. My HDD is still unrecognised.
However , i didn't checked in windows 7, i will do that soon.

Since, it seems a common problem, must also have a commong solution ? :suspiciou

Thank you.

 

[Mark56]

See if it still works with the Windows 7 PC, it may be a problem with the drive itself.

 

[Dhiman]

Its not again recognised in Windos 7 64 bit.
What am i supposed to do now? I cleaned up all my usb drivers but didn't worked either.

 

[Mark56]

It sounds like the drive has failed or the circuitry in the enclosure has developed a fault. Your best bet is to dismantle the external drive and hook the hard drive up to the internal wiring of a dektop PC. You could also use a USB adapter to connect it to a laptop. That may allow you to extract all the data. If it is the circuitry in the external drive enclosure you should be able to get a new enclosure and put the drive back into it.

If you get the drive to work I would run diagnostics on it to be sure it is still healthy. Follow the link below for the diagnostics software. You can use the downlaod for windows rather than the CD for dos.

Western Digital:http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?lang=en[/QUOTE]