External Hard Drive not recognized...

[danjergyrl]

My first post here, and it's not a happy one. Hoping one of you guys can help me.

I have a desktop pc with an external WD hard drive attached.

Last night I had to reboot and now it won't recognize my external hard drive. I've rebooted several times and get varying results.

Sometimes in device manager it says the device is working properly. Othertimes it says "this device can not start".

I tried to reinstall the driver for the external hard drive, but that doesn't seem to fix anything.

The external hard drive doesn't show up at all in My Computer or Disk Management.

If I unplug the USB and then plug it back in, the computer recognizes the hard drive as new hardware and installs, but the drive still doesn't show up in My Computer.

Is the external hard drive fried? Can I recover data off it, and if so, how?

 

[LTC8K6]

If it's a standard size hard drive, you can try removing it from the case and hooking it up as a slave drive in your computer.

 

[danjergyrl]

Thanks, I'll try that.

 

[Trashman]

I'd check other problems besides hard drive.....USB controller or OS needs updates.
Sounds like the same problem this guy is having......link

 

[cholley]

i would blame the drive, as western digital drives are turds