I have a HD-CE1.0TU2-AP Buffalo 560GB hard drive. I have just plugged the drive into my laptop, and the green light just blinks rather than it being constantly on. The drive is also not spinning, the laptop hasn't recognised the drive. Can I recover the data inside, and can the drive be fixed?

dropping it while turned on is fatal as it usually damages the write heads and/or the platters.
if it hit the floor, changes are it's physically damaged the mechanism.
recovering data from a drive with this damage is not cheap as you will have to send it away to be rebuilt. It's impossible to rebuild it yourself.

Try a powered hub. Buy a new enclosure. Don't password protect drives.

HI guys, I found a solution to a similar problem with the buffalo portable HDD that I brought from my friend. I just changed the HDD cable with the cable from Western Digital My Passport HDD and all problems were sorted out. Physically the WD cable is bit thicker than the Buffalo HDD cable. So suspect the cable is the problem. Please check if this is the problem with your Buffalo HDD before formatting. All the best

Indrajit Pande

try to test it on other computer or laptop... if the unit are still exist maybe your problem would be the external drive..there are no switch button on it, because most of the switches are located on the adapter, the only testing you could do is to test it to other unit..If the external drive are ok once after you test from other PC's, then might as well check your USB port by plugging-in to other port...or try to use other power supply on your computer, co'z sometimes the supply can no longer supplied any voltage coming from your external drive once it plug-in..

The power-supply seems OK, since you can hear it spinning, and the lamps are lit.

So, either the USB-to-disk-drive interface has failed, or the disk-drive itself has failed.

Open the enclosure, and remove the disk-drive, and connect it as a "slave" disk-drive in some desktop computer, to see if it works, when you bypass that 'USB' interface.

I/O Error Device means that the pc cannot communicate with your external HDD - either the USB cable is broken (replace it) or its control board has failed. If it's the latter then the Buffalo is dead, get a new one.

hi hazel.
see if this link helps you out.
laptop is no longer recognizing the Buffalo External Hard Drive Google...

MY BUFFALO HARD DRIVE model hd-HC320U2-us WILL NOT LOAD WHEN CONNECTED TO MY LAP OR DESK TOP WILL I BE ABLE TO GET MY INFORMATION OFF THE HARD DRIVE, IS THE INFO GONE! WHAT COULD BE THE PROBLEM POWER LIGHT COMES ON BUT THE ACCESS LIGHT DOES NOT BLINK............ TO SHOW CONNECTION HAPPENING

An external storage-device has four major components:

* the USB cable

* the power-adapter

* the disk-drive inside the enclosure

* the USB-to-disk-drive adapter inside the enclosure.

One of these components has failed.

Try a different USB cable.

Try connecting to a different USB port on your computer.

Try connecting to a USB port on a different computer.

Take a "multi-meter" and measure both the voltage and amperage output from the AC adapter, and compare with the specifications on the label on the adapter.

Open the enclosure, and remove the disk-drive, and then connect it as a "slave" disk-drive in a desktop computer, to see if it works at all.

Purchase a new, compatible, disk-drive, and install it in the enclosure, to "revive" your external storage device.

Get the part-number and serial-number from the label on your disk-drive, and access the manufacturer's web-site, and use "check warranty status", to see if they will replace the device, at minimal cost to you.

There exist commercial "data recovery" services that can try to repair your device, just long-enough to rescue and copy your files.
For example, see: https://services.seagate.com/index.aspx?lng=en-US for a "no data - no charge guarantee".

Check the usb port function in the computer bios settings and be sure that it is set to yes. Connect properly your external drive. If it has two wire usb connections, use both to obtain the maximum power that will be need by your drive.