WD Elements - External hard drive problem on my computer...can anyone help with this?

WD External and Portable SSD Portable SSD
1

Okay, so I plugged in my WD Elements 1 TB harddrive into my HP Pavilion G6 laptop (Windows 8) and for some reason, the harddrive did not show up in My Computer. Instead, I see that the WD Elements 1042 device is in Devices and Printers when I clicked the Safely Eject taskbar icon. This has never happened before, so I go into Device Manager and see if everything is connected properly. There seemed to be no problem with the harddrive itself so I thought a simple restart would solve everything. I restarted the computer, but the same problem is there. Anyone know how I can access my harddrive again without having to delete all my files on there? 

2

Check if the drive appears on Disk Management.

You can also try a different USB cable.

3

Still the same on Disk Management, says the drive is unknown and not initialized. 

4

Try using a data recovery software to retrieve the data.

In this case the drive needs to be initialized and formatted to be seen.

Bare in mind that this will delete the data.

5

The data can still be recovered after initializing and formatting the hard drive?

6

If the drive is corrupt then TestDisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk might fix it if you haven’t formatted the drive.

Joe

7

I had some old hard drives that I wanted to delete the data off of permanently.  So, I killed the partition, repartitioned, and quick formatted the drives.  I ran Recuva on the drives and did a deep scan.  I was able to pull all my data off the drives that had been there for about 10 years. I will now have to take the time to write zeros to those drives. Now, mind you some of it was unrecoverable.  But if you corrupted your drive, which appears to be the case, it’s probable that you won’t recover all of the data anyway. 

1 Like
8

Okay, thanks everyone for the help. I will try Bill’s method, since I’d rather recover some data than risk losing it all. 

9

Hope you didn’t apply this procedure yet.

The solution I found, thanks to connecting my external HD to a linux pc, is to launch chkdsk /f [driveletter]: 

After that rebooting 2 times the PC, and that did the trick.

Good luck.

Tobias