Western Digital elemant hdd beep sound/mounting issues

[j.o.s.h.1408]

Hi. i have a 320gb WD element usb powered HDD and recently it stopped mounting into a pc. As soon as i connect the hdd into a pc, i hear 5 beeping sounds all in the same duration and then finaly windows attempts to install the drivers for it and just hangs and the drive never appears on the computer.

My HDD is only 4-5 months old so i am a bit surprised at it failing on me. Do you guys have any suggestions on how i could fix it?

I think its still in warranty as i have not tampered with it or anything but i am trying to avoid sending it back with all my data still intact just incase WD steal or use my data inside it

Any suggestions? thanks in advance

edit: i checked disk management and it recognises it their as Disk 2 but says that its not initialized?

i right clicked and select initialize disk and a popup window comes up asking me what partition style should i use.

the two partition styles i can use is MBR and GPT. i selected MBR first and an error pops up saying Incorrecnt function.

i then selected the other and still the same error

edit

[kalniel]

WD will not steal or use your data, but check it in another computer and with another cable if possible to rule out anything else before returning it.

[j.o.s.h.1408]

I have checked it in 5 different computers and still the same issue

[peterb]

If it was just one computer and it is USB powered, I'd suspect that the computer wasn't delivering enough current to operate it (even though it has worked previously) Unlikley on 5 though, but it might be worth trying it with an external PSU or double headed USB cable (unless it is internally powered - I'm not familiar with that drive)

Will it mount on another OS? I've had drives that won't automount on a Windows system but can be mounted on a Linux system - which would allow you to get the data off and then re-install a filesystem. Time to get out that Linux live CD.

You could also do some internal Windows tweaking of the setup files and registry to manually remove Window's knowledge of the drive from the system, but that is tricky, and not something I'd want to describe here. However as you have tried it on other machines, I doubt that would help.

So either the disk(or internal interface) is faulty, or the disk has become corrupted. I'd go for the alternative OS route to try and preserve the data, and then clear it and start again (provided you can mount it). If it still won't work, then return it.