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General discussion

External Hard drive not responding:(

Sep 9, 2010 1:25PM PDT

Hello,
I been using my WD Elements external drive (1Tb) since more than a year and never had any problem. I used it mainly to play videos on my xbox360 but today it suddenly stopped working so when I try plugging it n my computer it doesn?t show up n my computer. Many people have been telling be that its ?dead? so I don?t really care about the actual drive I am wondering if there is a way to recover the data easily? Also the bluelight on the drive still turns on and makes a sound for first few minutes of connecting it to the computer but after that it goes silent and ?Safely remove hardware? icon appears in the taskbar so my computer recognizes the drive but the icon in my computer folder never appears so I cannot access the drive. I have tried plugging in different computer and still no luck. I know I don?t have a faulty usb cable since I used that same cable to connect my printer and it works fine. I am able to see the drive in device manager but not in disk management. Btw my drive is out of warranty as well. I downloaded "PC Inspector File Recovery" and as u can see here:http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/955/54603928.jpg it detects my drive but as 2Tb which is incorrect as mine is 1TB also it was doing the same thing when i tried someones suggested solution on this cnet forum to download this utility: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download and follow their steps but when i started doing it my drive shows the size of 2199 GB as you can see here: http://img541.imageshack.us/img541/1125/2000k.jpg
Please help me

Discussion is locked

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What to do first
Sep 10, 2010 7:48AM PDT

Disassemble the enclosure and remove the drive. See if it's the type that can plug directly into your PCs MB or be placed in another enclosure. If you're lucky, it's just the old enclosure circuitry that went bad. If the drive still isn't detected using other connection methods, your chances to recover the data yourself grow a bit slim. Try the above suggestion and post back.

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No idea :(
Sep 11, 2010 2:39AM PDT
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Just remove the 'adapter'...the small PCB that served as the
Sep 11, 2010 2:50AM PDT

interface in the external enclosure.

VAPCMD

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confused
Sep 11, 2010 3:12AM PDT

what adapter? where is the adapter located? am so lost .. also where inside of my computer do i connect it ?

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First things first
Sep 11, 2010 3:35AM PDT
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After?
Sep 11, 2010 4:35AM PDT

so after removing that board what should i do? do i have to connect that board to pc ? remember i want to connect my drive to pc so i can see if its working or not thx

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Assuming you removed the external PCB connector
Sep 11, 2010 5:32AM PDT

from the HDD, you need to open your PC. More than likely you should have an extra SATA hard drive connector on the motherboard which you cable to the WD hard drive you're testing and a power connector.

It should be as simple as connecting the two cables to the hard drive and starting the PC to see if the WD drive is working. If any questions...take a PIC and post as you did before.

VAPCMD