WD Elements External Drive has stopped showing on my drives

I know this topic has been discussed until we’re all blue in the face, but a few days ago I noticed my WD Elements drive stopped appearing on my devices/drives list. I have heard it might related to a recent Windows 10 update, but everything that seems to have worked for others is not working for me. The ONLY way I can see the drive is on my device list as Elements and some numbers next to it. I went into device manager and noticed the Mass USB Storage driver had a yellow warning sign next to it, so I tried to uninstall, hoping when I restarted and reconnected the drive it would fix the problem. Nothing has worked, and all the WD utilities you can find are not doing anything to help bring the drive back online. When I power the drive up, it spins up, then spins down about two minutes ago. It doesn’t make any other of those clicking sounds when a drive is dying. Next, I took the drive out of the external casing and plugged the drive directly into my desktop SATA/power connection. The drive powered up and did the same exact thing and remained on the entire time, but never showed up in Disk Management at all. Next troubleshooting step was to take the drive ot my laptop, which is also Windows 10, to no avail. Next, I attempted to plug the drive via usb into a desktop with Windows 8.1. Attempted connection via USB and then direct to SATA. My 3 TB drive has so many files that I thought were being backed up by the backup software that came with the drive (Smartware), and even after registering for Smartware Pro, it didn’t retrieve any files I had been backing up. Is my cause hopeless? Do I have to go to Geek Squad and pay a jillion dollars to recover my files? I honestly think I have tried everything to get this drive back online. Any other pointers are appreciated, I just don’t see why it recognizes the usb connection but won’t mount the drive. When I tried to download a driver Microsoft said a driver was already used and updated for the external drive. Please help!

Hello,

It is possible the partition is corrupted. I recommend you try recovering the data using a data recovery software before trying a data recovery company.

Thanks! Any particular brand you can recommend?

I installed Recuva to see if it could do anything, but the program wouldn’t even recognize the drive was connected. (A few minutes after connecting the drive, Windows continues to throw up an error saying the USB device could not be recognized, and disappears from the Devices list. Don’t think my options are going to get much better.

This is going to sound ridiculous. I had a major issue when my WD My Book wasn’t being recognised, or rather the USB device wasn’t recognised. I read about how someone had found a loose connection problem but the connections were all good.

Horrifyingly simple as this may sound, I unplugged the USB cable between My Book and my laptop, then I blew hard into the My Book socket, there must have been just enough dust in there to cause a bad connection because when I put the cable back in and connected to the PC it worked fine.

Told you it would sound ridiculous but it is true.