Western Digital External Hard Drive No Longer Recognized

  • Thread starter Thread starter mpropst
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mpropst

I have a Western Digital WDXB2500JBRNN External Hard Drive that is
about 1-1/2 years old. I use it only to back up my system using
Retrospect 6.5 software that came packaged with it. My last backup was
about a week ago, when I went to back up today the Retrospect gave a
response Drive Not Ready and sure enough the external hard drive was no
longer showing up as a drive in My Computer. I shut down the hard
drive and shut down the computer then I turned back on the drive and
rebooted the computer and it was still not recognized. I went into
Disk Management and it also was not showing up there. I unplugged the
USB cable from the back of the computer and plugged it into the the
front USB port it recognized the drive as a USB hub, and the USB ports
on the drive work but the drive itself was still not recognized. Since
my last back up I have installed some Microsoft updates and last night
while copying a CD the system froze with a data read error (I was only
copying from one cd directly to another) I had to power down the
computer with the power button since ctrl+alt+del no longer responded.
The Microsoft updates and the computer freeze last night would be the
only significant events since my last backup to the drive. Any help
would be greatly appreciated. I have yet to try the drive on another
computer, I plan on trying that this evening when I get home.
 
I have a Western Digital WDXB2500JBRNN External Hard Drive that is
about 1-1/2 years old. I use it only to back up my system using
Retrospect 6.5 software that came packaged with it. My last backup was
about a week ago, when I went to back up today the Retrospect gave a
response Drive Not Ready and sure enough the external hard drive was no
longer showing up as a drive in My Computer. I shut down the hard
drive and shut down the computer then I turned back on the drive and
rebooted the computer and it was still not recognized. I went into
Disk Management and it also was not showing up there. I unplugged the
USB cable from the back of the computer and plugged it into the the
front USB port it recognized the drive as a USB hub, and the USB ports
on the drive work but the drive itself was still not recognized. Since
my last back up I have installed some Microsoft updates and last night
while copying a CD the system froze with a data read error (I was only
copying from one cd directly to another) I had to power down the
computer with the power button since ctrl+alt+del no longer responded.
The Microsoft updates and the computer freeze last night would be the
only significant events since my last backup to the drive. Any help
would be greatly appreciated. I have yet to try the drive on another
computer, I plan on trying that this evening when I get home.
Click to expand...

Hard drives and their electronics do fail. To identify the fault,
test the drive and enclosure with another computer. If OK, then the
computer's USB circuits are not working properly. If not OK, then
remove the HD from the enclosure and test the HD as a slave. If OK,
then enclosure's electronics are bad. If not OK, then the HD has failed.
 
You don't mention it, did you used the "Safely Remove Hardware" option/icon
first before turning the external drives power off..?

Try starting the computer, logging in to your desktop, wait for things to
settle down, then flip on the power for the external drive. You should see in
the lower right side of the task bar the Safely Remove Hardware icon, hold
the pointer over it, click it, click safely remove mass storage device.. The
rest should be obvious..
Always turn off the external enclosure drive in this way first, then shut
down the computer..
I have had no problems with my external drive since following the above
procedure.
Cheers.
j;-j
 
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