Hi

I'm trying to help out with a dodgy external hard drive USB 2.0 (W.D. 500Gb?)

Using Win 10, my internal drives are C & D, but  the external drive won't show up in explorer.
However it shows up in drives and devices.
I've spent a while on Youtube and I have done what they all seem to demonstrate - but no luck!

right click 'this pc'  > manage > disk management
.......and that's as far as I can go.

 

The following  is on you tube but for me there is no right click menu.

   new simple volume wizard > assign a drive letter > etc etc 

 

I've got as far as here...........
control panel>drives and devices>right click ex HDD>properties

I hope I'm makes sense as this is probably a common enough problem 

but sifting thro' all the conflicting info out there is a problem in itself 
So what can I do now?  ????

Referring to 2nd picture (disk management):

There is also no right-click menu on the hatched grey area of  "Disk 2"?

 

What I would do is create a Linux bootable thumb drive then boot from it.  If the disk drive is OK in Linux this shows this to be a Windows problem, and if not, then the disk drive is borked.

First try another USB cable then try it on another computer if still no good then try taking  the hard drive out of the enclosure and connecting either directly to the SATA port on your computer  or via a

SATA/IDE -USB adaptor like this

https://www.lazada.co.th/products/oker-usb-20-to-sataide-cable-st-682-black-i171001503-s213203745.html?spm=a2o4m.searchlist.list.10.4cc62c3bqup4N5&search=1

 

if that doesn't work then you  are getting into the realms of data recovery......

however if when you plug the drive in you can feel it start to spin and it doesn't make clicking and grinding noises..you may be able to just get the  hard drive controller board repaired I did that once with good results the drive worked perfectly no data loss at all..much cheaper than sending the whole drive off to have the platters read.

 

 KhunBENQ

Referring to 2nd picture (disk management):

There is also no right-click menu on the hatched grey area of  "Disk 2"?

 

No right click menu 

The external drive's Led light comes on..... but doesn't blink.

Also I can here the disc spinning.

Anyway thanks for the helpful input. I'll work thro' it.

  

The good thing about being retired is having plenty of time for a challenge. 55555

8 hours ago, johnnybgood said:

The external drive's Led light comes on..... but doesn't blink.

Also I can here the disc spinning.

Anyway thanks for the helpful input. I'll work thro' it.

  

The good thing about being retired is having plenty of time for a challenge. 55555

Yeah, it might be dead, or maybe not. disk management is showing you an 80GB (?) partition on your disk 2 which may be according to you a 500GB disk. That would give you about 410GB of unused space. The fact that disk management is actually seeing this partition means there is some life in the drive.

 

Type Macrorit Partition Expert 5.3.9_Freeware into Google, go to their homepage and download this free app. It is portable and will give you a much better view of what is on your disk 2 with a vast array of options on what you can do to the disk and partitions that are on there.

Whenever I have a hardware problem in Windows I do what Oxx mentioned above: boot into Linux from a thumb drive.  Even if you're not interested in learning Linux using the desktop may be enough.  If Linux sees it, there you are.  The disk can be on the way out, so if it comes up this may be a good time to salvage your files.  Yeah, it's probably not too fast with a thumb drive installation, but just get the xfer going and let it copy overnight, or whatever. The legacy partitioning tool, gparted, will make things easy to re-partition but if you haven't had much experience with this a Windows utility is probably safer.  Or maybe somebody in the Linux forum can recommend something else.

A sounds dumb but sometimes it works thing to try is open the drive's case and unplug, then re-plug, all the connectors.  Carefully.  I'm kinda clumsy myself, so if there's someone with more nimble fingers around I'll try to get them to do it.

 

 

if you dont need the data, I also use a linux bootable stick

1) download Yumi

2) download Gparted iso

3) use yumi to install gparted on a 4g usb drive.

4)start pc bios to boot into usb stick

5)gparted will find wd drive, format it to NTFS

6)done, reboot to Windows

50 minutes ago, BigT73 said:

gparted will find wd drive, format it to NTFS

 

Gparted also has an "attempt data rescue" option which may be worth a try before going nuclear.

Thanks to you all for the response with expert recommendations. I'll bookmark this stuff for the next time.   

 

The owner of the duff drive decided to take it to some IT guru at her work as he has use of another OS besides Windows (probably Linux).

I suppose I should feel chuffed that I was asked before him !! 

A happy ending. ????