My western digital 120 external hard drive is not appearing in "my computer" but appears in my taskbar. the autorun seems deleted or moved to vault by antivirus software by my friends' computer. How can i recover my data???thank you very much mike@smallville S10

Good Day!

is your HD Fell? have you try to open it to another computer? try it first. if the computer you inserted is OK. there seems a problem regardless to your computer. try to reformat it and install Win XP pro. (SP3)

Thanks and God Bless!

1. To restore the Western Digital icon to the drive letter for the external drive in "My Computer".
2. Please go to the Western Digital Download Library and download the WD Logo Icon which has a file name of External Icon.zip when you download it.
3. Save the file to your desktop and use a file compression software like Winzip to extract the files inside the .zip file to your desktop. When it's unzipped, it will create a folder named "ExternalIcon" on your desktop.
4. Double-click on the ExternalIcon folder. It will open a Windows Explorer showing a folder named, Autorun, and a file named, Autorun.inf.Double-click on My Computer and it will open.
5. Double-click on the driver letter that represents the Western Digital drive you want the icon on and it will open.
6. Highlight the Autorun folder and the Autorun.inf file. Right-click on them, and left-click on Cut when the Menu appears.
7. Right-click in the open space of the drive that you opened in the new Explorer window, and then left-click on Paste.
8. Close both Explorer windows, safely remove the external hard drive by using the Safely Remove icon in the system tray, shut down the computer, and unplug the external drive from the computer.
9. After you reboot into Windows, reconnect the external drive to the computer again, and the Western Digital Icon should now be displayed with the drive letter in My Computer.

If these steps do not correct the problem, you will need to re-format your External Hard Drive ***WARNING*** FORMATTING A HARD DRIVE WILL ERASE, YOU WILL LOSE, ALL DATA

You may try putting your hard disk into another box to see if it works. If it does it is a box problem if it doesn't it's an hard disk problem

if virus in ur external hard drive and ur divice if no any virus in ur both divice then ur ext.hard drive safely unplug...

Have you tried renaming autorun.inf or the autorun folder to something else? This file or folder would be in the root directory of the drive.

That would be my guess.

Please be kind when you rate -- I admit this is a guess.

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Is there a physical switch or a slider on the enclosure, to enforce the "writing not allowed" configuration? Did your friend move the switch/slider?

Take it back to where you bought it, and get a replacement,
or at least get them to demonstrate that it _does_ work, when connected to a Mac computer (not a Windows computer).

The 1TB drive is USB 2.0, make sure you're not connecting to a USB 1.0 port on your computer.

Attach your external HD with some other computer, that will definitely appear normal, the problem is due to a virus in ur HD. Your computer's antivirus software stops it to appear. Back up your data on the other computer, format ur external HD, remove un-necessary files and run a virus scan to the files u copied from HD, Hope this will solve the problem, if not, let me know and tell me what would be the response on the other compuer