WESTERN DIGITAL external hard drive crash

[JCROCCO]

My friend . . . .HONEST!!! . . . had problems with his email, so he started unplugging things on his computer, and one of them was the external hard drive. Now, it wont find it. I cant access it. It even comes up saying it needs to be formatted after a few minutes. I answered yes, and it failed. It is connected via usb. Can these external HD's be reformatted? I dont care about the info on it, it was a backup anyway.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Smilin]

Check your system event log for 7,9,11,5x events.

I'm on my 3rd WD external drive right now. Not sure if that's statistically significant but they've nonetheless moved to piece of ****** status in my book.

 

[Smilin]

and yes, they can be formatted, partitioned all that good stuff just like any other drive.

Format failure was one of the symptoms I encountered on both my previous drives. Don't spose you got it from newegg did ya?

 

[JCROCCO]

How do you get around format failure?

 

[RebateMonger]

A big problem that was reported last year with WD external drives was that the power cable connectors were loose. They'd fall out on their own during use. Don't know if that could cause this kind of problem or not.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: JCROCCO
How do you get around format failure?

You don't.

You can try repartitioning the drive but really that's just monkeying with sector 0 and the boot sectors. There isn't much to break in just two sectors. If that doesn't work you can low level format which really should never have to be done.

RMA it.