External hard drive broken shows up in device manager but not My Computer

L

luvbugbub03

I have a Western Digital 250 GB external HD that had been working perfectly until yesterday afternoon. It has been making this repetitive whirring noise *not the clicking noise of death* and it died before I had a chance to copy the data onto another external. When I plug in the USB it makes the connection noise, but autoplay does not come up and it does not show up in my computer anymore. I did look in device manager and disk management and it does show up but it had no drive letter and it says unreadable. (I've attached a screenshot of this)

i1089.photobucket.com/albums/i359/aadickinson88/ss2.jpg
i1089.photobucket.com/albums/i359/aadickinson88/ss1.jpg

Is there any way I can recover the data off of it? Should I just take it out of the enclosure and hook it up to a desktop pc?
 
It sounds like the drive itself is dead rather than the enclosure. The repetitive 'whirring' noise likely is immediately following the click of death, just the click is pretty quiet on a lot of notebook drives. If yours is a full size (3.5") drive in that enclosure, then perhaps you are right and the click of death isn't occurring.

In either case, its not going to hurt to hook it up internally, because even if it doesn't work you aren't any worse off than you are now.
 
I agree with SNGX. The disk may have failed. Removing the disk from the enclosure and testing it internally or using a USB adapter cable is worth a shot.

fyi.. i did find some info on MS website about "Unreadable" status in Disk Management HERE. p.s. your USB external is a "basic" disk
A basic or dynamic disk's status is Unreadable.

Cause:

The basic or dynamic disk is not accessible and might have experienced hardware failure, corruption, or I/O errors. The disk's copy of the system's disk configuration database might be corrupted. An error icon appears on disks that display the Unreadable status.

Disks might also display the Unreadable status while they are spinning up or when Disk Management is rescanning all of the disks on the system. In some cases, an unreadable disk has failed and is not recoverable. For dynamic disks, the Unreadable status usually results from corruption or I/O errors on part of the disk, rather than failure of the entire disk.

Solution:

Rescan the disks or restart the computer to see if the disk status changes. For instructions describing how to rescan the disks, see To update disk information

For more information about disk status descriptions, see Disk status descriptions
Click to expand...
 
possibly overheated

the 2nd external hard drive i set up, one where you put your own drive in, died i na short span of time - a couple months.

it had no cooling, or venting. i think it just got too hot.
 
SNGX1275 said:
It sounds like the drive itself is dead rather than the enclosure. The repetitive 'whirring' noise likely is immediately following the click of death, just the click is pretty quiet on a lot of notebook drives. If yours is a full size (3.5") drive in that enclosure, then perhaps you are right and the click of death isn't occurring.

In either case, its not going to hurt to hook it up internally, because even if it doesn't work you aren't any worse off than you are now.
Click to expand...

It is a 3.5" I think I am going to hook it up and see if I can salvage anything! Thanks for your help!
 
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