I have 1TB “WD Elements Desktop” external HD and when i connect to my laptop running windows 7 it completely freezes my laptop and i had to disconnect the USB and hard boot my laptop to make it working again;
I am not sure if it is getting recognized in device management as well and drive is in My computer as it completely freezes my laptop i am unable to open any of the applications;
I installed WD Diagnostic utility as well but unable to run this utility as it freezes my whole laptop
I have tried replacing the cable and trying on different laptop issue is still same;
Any help appreciated
SN:
Please try the troubleshooting steps mentioned below:
► Try to connect the drive with a different known working USB cable and USB port on the computer.
► Check whether the drive is humming or are you able to feel any vibration on the drive.
►Check if the drive is recognized under Device Manager (Disk Drives) and Disk Management.
►If the drive shows up under Disk Management, try to recover the data using any Data Recovery software or get in touch with data recovery partners.
If all this does not work, try on a different computer.
I suspect it’s a hardware physical failure. I wouldn’t recommend using any software, including CrystalDiskInfo, to check its health. You should contact a local physical data recovery company directly. They can open the drive in a cleanroom environment or use specialized equipment to read the platters.
If you don’t care about losing the data and just want to make the hard drive usable again, you can try one of these solutions in Windows:
Method 1: Using Disk Management
Right-click “Computer” → “Manage” → “Disk Management”. Plug in the hard drive and see if it shows up. If it does (and your system hasn’t completely frozen yet), immediately right-click it and choose “Delete Volume” or “Format”.
Method 2: Using Command Prompt (Diskpart)
Before plugging in the hard drive, open CMD as an administrator and type diskpart.
Plug in the hard drive, then immediately type list disk and press Enter (this step might freeze).
If it displays the external hard drive’s number (let’s assume it’s Disk 1), type select disk 1.
Type clean to clear all partition structures. If this succeeds, the system will stop trying to read the corrupted file system, and your computer won’t freeze anymore. After that, you just need to repartition it.
How to repartition the drive?
In “Disk Management”, look for the black bar marked “Disk 1” (or Disk 2) that says “Unallocated”. Right-click on this black area and choose New Simple Volume. A wizard will pop up—you don’t need to change any numbers, just keep clicking Next until you reach the “Format Partition” page. Make sure Perform a quick format is checked, and click finish.
