When I plug in my Western Digital Elements external drive (2 TB I think) in Windows Vista, I now see the drivers being installed, but then I can’t see the drive in Windows Explorer. I tried it on my home laptop and at a public PC.
When I plug it in, the light in the back lights up and flashes for a short while and the drive makes buzzing sounds (two tonalities, one after the other) for a short while also. I had to pop back in the plastic case recently, so I don’t know if a physical problem is causing this.
Also: when I go in Start menu/Right click on computer/Manage/Disk management, I see a black bar on Disk 1, and it is written below that “Unallocated” on the right and “Not Initialized” on the left.
Please, can you help me? I have all my data on there! What can I do?
The drive is been recognized but it shows unformatted.
If the data is on another drive backed up, you can initialize and format the drive.
If on the other hand the data is not safe in a backup storage, you can look for a recovery software and attempt a retrieval process.
Check the links bellow for more information.
How to initialize or write a signature to a secondary hard drive or Solid State drive in Windows (8, 7, Vista, XP)
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1018
How to partition and format a WD drive on Windows (8, 7, Vista, XP) and Mac OSX
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3865
WD external drive is not assigned a drive letter by Windows or Mac OSX and data on the drive is inaccessible
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1164
Hello,
It may be possible to still extract the data utilizing data recovery software. Western Digital does not provide data recovery software. However, there are several kinds of Data Recovery software available. If you do a web search for Data Recovery it will yield plenty of data recovery software options.
