20 Most Recent Western Digital 120 GB USB 2.0 Hard Drive Questions & Answers

A drive in sleep mode doesnot shorten the life.But old drives in sleep mode are still passively active and reallocating the bad sectors of hard disk. so New disks have no problem. but once bad or weak sectors develop then its unsafe to make it go in sleep mode.

I had a similar problem with some other brand of external drive. I disconnected it without being stopped and then nothing would recognize it. It was new when this happened, I contacted the manufacturer and they sent me a files with software and instructions to recover it. It was not that easy since I'm no computer geek, it took quite a while but finally the drive worked again. Info was lost since I had to formated it, can't remember exactly is low level formatting but alive again. Also try to go to my computer icon on the desktop and right click, go to "manage" there you'll see an option for disk management, there you might be lucky and make it work again. Hope this helps, regards.

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.

Note that W.D. has a "Customer Loyalty" program -- you can buy a new W.D. device, through the W.D. web-site, at a significant discount.

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.

The disk-drive inside the W.D. enclosure is "dying" -- although it still "announces" itself, via Plug-and-Play, as being a disk-drive, some of the data, notably the "table-of-contents", cannot be read.

Access the W.D. web-site, and check the warrranty-status of the disk-drive;
if the warranty still is valid, W.D. will replace it.

If the warranty has expired, then W.D. has a "Customer Loyalty" program -- you get a discount when buying a new W.D. disk-drive through the W.D. web-site.

There exist professional "data recovery" services that can "rescue" the files on your disk.
Not inexpensive, of course.

Hello

OK, at the link below you will be directed to a tip i wrote on this exact error.

Click HERE.

Feel free to let me know if you have any further questions.

Kind regards
Andrea

the red light probably suggests a problem, habe you recently had any other type of removable or network storage attached, mapped network drives or anyhting like that?

you say the computer recognises it was plugged in, i presume from the noise the computer makes? i would first be checking the device manager to see if there are no problems (right click my computer - properties - hardware tab - device manager), look for any yellow exclamation marks or question marks..

secondly i would make sure it hasnt tried to assign the same drive letter to the external as something else plugged into the machine or something silly like that, check the disk manager..

(right click my computer - manage - on the left click disk management)

look in the list at the bottom for the drive, even if it isnt accessible in my computer, if the computer recognises it as any type of disk at all, it will show it here.. if it does, look at the drive letter, and if it has the same as something else, simply change it (right click the external - change drive letter and paths) remove the current letter - follow the same process again and give a new one that is unused

if there is nothing under device manager, and no external in disk management when it is plugged in, then i dare say its probably had its day..

hope this helps

You can use Handy Recovery, You might need to buy it , or ask one of your clever mates to get you a crack or two, i've used Handy Recovery and it works Perfect, once you've got your data, make a backup a.s.a.p!!!!, and replace the HDD

Point your browser to Download.com
Pick up a file at this link Simple File Shredder.

You'll be all set.

You should not even try to install an operating system on an external drive. Windows looks at the "C" drive and installs programs to "C" drive. You are trying to put it on the "G" drive. You will have too many problems and wish you never had tried. Buy a larger main drive and partition it with two equal partitions. Then "Dual Boot". You will find how to do this on the internet. Just Google "Dual Booting".

Get TESTDISK and see if it is recognised, if so TestDisk has some tools that may help

If your HARD DRIVE was exposed to a magnetic field, this can happen.
Try a scandisck run.
Boot up in safe mode and run fix disk.

The hard disk is having bad sectors on its first 3000 sectors.the bad sectors are caused by degradation of the platter of the hard disk.OR the factory area of the hard disk has certain files called SMART, G -LIST and other log files.Unless one empties those log files with a good tool , one cant format ones hard disk.

This is likely a couple problems; 1. The hard drive is dying or is dead. You're looking at hardware recovery if this is the case. There are some tools such as Spinrite that might be able to recover the disk. (GRCHard drive data recovery software) 2. The power supply on the computer/laptop is not functioning as well as it used to. Try using another PC to see if there's any difference in results.