A couple of months ago, I plugged one of my WD external hard drives (320GB My Passport essential) into the USB port (computer runs Vista). Never had any issues with any of my external hard drives before. Although the little white light turned on as soon I plugged it, the drive did not get detected. Shortly after that, I plugged another WD external drive (500GB Passport Studio, I think) and exactly the same thing happened. The white light was on but the drive was not detected. I then plugged a third external hard drive (Toshiba) and it worked without any issues. I tried a fourth hard drive (WD but with a fire-wire connection) and that worked just fine as well.
My initial reaction was that this was due to the known issue with WD drives and the USB cables. Tried different USB cables, no luck. Called WD technical support, they sent me double USB cables – that did not help either. Of course, they suggested that I send the drives to a data recovery service and they would then send me new drives as part of the warranty. Quite an expensive proposition…:manmad:
I bought a docking station, removed the hard drives from the enclosure kits and connected the drives. Same thing – the drives were not detected. Then I thought that the drives were affected by some electric circuit issue, even though my computer is connected through a UPS station (I had noticed some issue with the power at home the day before).
In any case, the issues with the two drives seem to be identical, except for the following minor differences:
- one of the drives is detected only as a “WD” with a red “X” (or maybe it was an arrow, can’t recall) under disk management. Disk management indicates that the device is working properly, yet none of its properties can be seen. This same drive makes a quiet “rrrrrr” noise for about 3-4 seconds, but this does not sound like the “clicking noise of death”.
- the other drive does not make any noise and does not get detected at all by the computer.
Note that I have tried connecting the drives to different computers (desktops with Vista and laptops with Windows 7).
Any help would be appreciated. Thank you very much in advance!