External hard drive

[daboos]

Hello

My external Hard Drive - Western Digital My Book Essential Edition External 500GB.

My problem is : i can no longer use it.

What happened

- I dont know if its is relevent but 1 day before i transfered a large amount of data to my friend (about 50 - 100 gigs) - i safely removed everytime.
- Was watching a film and about 3/4 through it froze. I ended task and tried again and froze. It seems this file is corrupt.
- I restarted my pc to see if anything was wrong and i got the blue screen telling me i need to do a scan on my external which crashed so i restarted again and skipped through it (spacebar)
- I managed to locate the corrupted file and delete it using "unlocker" and all seemed ok until i discovered another corruption, so i ran chkdsk and it also found a corrupt file and deleted and sort it out.
- more and more files began to get corrupted ... i dont know why
- after a while every file i tried to open inside the external HD was empty
- Not long after, i couldnt even get into the HD with "its unavaliable" message
- Finally, the hard drive was no longer listed inside "my computer"

Where i am now

-No external shown in my computer under hard disk drives.
-Computer detects the hard drive as "WD" and says my hard drive is ready to be used.
-There is no external hard drive in disk management
-However my hard drive is showing up in device manager>disk drives as "WD"
-if i go to the properties - disk: unknown - type : unknown - Partition style : not applicable - capacity space all 0mb. Driver is displayed as version 5.1.2535.0 i tried updating, reinstalling.
-also if i boot my pc, it will freeze in the screen where you would press del to go to BIOS and only resume when i unplug the external (strange)

This is when i started looking through google for answers...

I checked the WD website and tried western digital diag and got the error message: Cable Test::Read diagnostics sector error!

So i tried to format it using WD FAT32 formatter and got the error message Error: Drive size is too small or not supported! (WDWD)

after further reading, it was apparent i mite have a partition problem, so i tried using partition table doctor 3.5 and got the warning message Warning! Harddisk2 heads is 1, sectors is 1. If PTD cannot find correct partition for you, you may try to access CMOS setup program and change the LBA mode setting on the harddisk 2 to one of the following modes, and then run PTD to recover partition.

(1) auto mode (2) LBA mode (3) Large mode (4) CHS mode

then i got

Error: cannot read from MBR on harddisk 2

Which leaves me to where i am now

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

system info: windows xp, amd64 3700+, 2.2Ghz, 1024RAM, radeon x1950 pro,

[arthurleung]

A few things you can try:

1. Replace the USB cable
2. Try another USB port
3. Switch off system and external harddrive, and disconnect from mains for a few hours to cool down completely. Don't forget to disconnect the USB cable as well.
4. Try another power supply (for the external harddrive) if you have one.

If the above steps didn't help at all, depends on if you want to recover the data from the harddrive or not, you could:

1. Remove the harddrive from the enclosure (voids warranty) to plug into your computer directly (probably SATA)
2. Send it back to Western Digital for replacement (RMA).

That is assuming the USB chipset in the enclosure is broken. If the harddrive is broken physically then there is nothing else you can do.

Does the drive still spin-up properly?

[daboos]

Thanks for the reply,

I tried all of those steps apart from replacing the cables (since i don't have any other cables)

I don't want to recover the data, but it would be a bonus if i got it all back. I had about 250 gigs

The hard drive spins when it is connected, but after it simply stays still.

thanks again for your help

I have warranty and i will send it off if i cant get a fix for it.