I’ve recently bought a Western Digital Elements 1TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive prior to a reinstall of windows XP. unfortunately after backing up my data on the external drive I had yet to transfer it all back to my PC and now the external drive is no longer being recognized by either my laptop or my desk top (both on XP operating systems).
Here are the facts, it was working on my systems with out any problems, then it was accidentally knocked of my desk whilst it was streaming video to my lap top. It continued to work for 30 seconds (the video) but then it froze and the HD started to make some very strange noises as it tried to read data. I’ve not been able to get it to work since
However, when I plug and unplug it, it is greeted by the usual bleep that XP makes when its had a USB device connected to it. It also still shows up in my device manager’ on both my laptop and desk top (it will even let me uninstall it, reinstall it, search for updates, etc from the ‘device manager’ screen).
The hard drive also still shows up when right clicking in the C drive and selecting ‘properties’, and then the ‘hardware tab’, when highlighted it shows it to be located at ‘location 0’ and that ‘the device is working properly’.
However when right clicking on ‘my computer’ and selecting ‘manage’, it is NOT displayed with my internal hard drive on the ‘disk management tab’, under the ‘storage’ heading.
The only difference in the external drives behavior other than it being no longer recognized by either of my computers, is now the odd beeping sound it makes when it is connected to the computer, which I can only presume is the hard drive trying to read data, as it sounds more mechanical than a warning beep; the beep stops after about 20 seconds or so.
If any one can suggest a way of salvaging data from this drive by any means I would be eternally grateful, all the information from the drive is my primary concern, I don?t really care either way about getting it to work in a normal fashion, beyond transferring its current contents on to my PC
Many, many thanks in advance; I hope there is enough information to go on.
Matt