Computer doesn't recognize hard drive

The fact that it displays a '0% used' indicator probably means that somehow the data that you have hitherto stored on your external hard drive has been erased. This might not necessarily be the case, so don't panic yet.

The first thing I would try doing is reinstalling any software that came with your WD My Book. Not many external HDDs require additional software to run properly, but if yours does, then I strongly recommend reinstalling that first. I would then try using Windows Disk Manager to see if your computer is recognizing the G: drive as a hard drive, because I have had to use disk manager when I've added additional internal hard drives to my computer. If neither of these work [or you could not find the CD your My Book came with] I would search around online for driver or software updates available for your device.

One thing that I noticed while typing my suggestion for you is that before you attempting using the back up feature on your My Book, the drive for the My Book was (G:) but after you attempted the back up process the drive is indicated as (H:). I think that what might have happened was that when you attempted backing up the My Book, it was partitioned into a storage section (G:) and a section in which the backup data is stored (H:). If you can find and access it, the (G:) drive is likely to still contain all the data that you previously assigned to it.

If this doesn't help, I apologize, but I sincerely hope that your problem will be resolved.

External hard drives don't need any program installed on your computer to run. Your operating system Windows, Linux should handle it as soon as you plug the usb in your computer. The programs included in your WD external hard drive are tools to backup your data.

If you try to hook up your hard drive to a Windows prior to XP, maybe your computer will not handle it.

It is always safer to safely remove your drive using the green arrow icon in the lower right corner of your screen. This way, the drive is shut down properly and you minimize chances of fails when you plug it again on another computer.

Hope this helps!

if it was dropped the head is dead

Probably not the right answer for your problem. Mine is an external 1 TB Simple Drive. Mine wouldn't respond at all. I unplugged the power cable from the back of the hard drive and replugged it in and instantly it worked (with the computer and hard drive plugged in). I had tried rebooting the computer, plugging/unplugging over and over into the computer and that didn't work.

If the 1 tb is spinning up, which I assume it is, the new PC (assuming a Win 7 OS) should see it and mount a driver to be able to talk with it. I would double check all my connections at the drive and the PC, try different USB ports just in case one is dead.

You will need to install the drivers to your computer before the system will see the drive because of the "size" of the drive (1 TB) and the way the OS will need to "talk" to the drive in order to recognize the correct size and know how to place the files on the drive.

perhaps the new hard drive is bad western digital software is junk take it back and get seagate external w/freeagent on it

Plug both Drives into Computer USB ports. double click on my computer, double click on the drive that has the files, highlite the files you would like to move, right click within the highlited files, then select copy, go back to my computer, double click on the other drive, the one you would like to move the files to, right click and select paste. That`s it. After you verify that your files are on the Seagate drive, then you can delete the files on my book or whatever. Good luck

Connect it to a different computer.
If it still is not recognized, then either:
* the USB-to-disk-drive adapter inside the casing has failed,
* the disk-drive inside the casing has failed.

If the former, open the casing, remove the disk-drive,
and temporarily connect it as a "slave" disk-drive to a desktop computer, to see if the drive itself is OK.

You need to go into the BIOS of your computer and change the boot order of your computer.  Your computer must be set to boot from your main hard drive only.