It powers up for a few secound and thencuts off

It sounds like a power issue check all leads attached to your external western digital make sure they are securely seated and are not faulty

click start control panel administrive tools ,computer management ,device manager look through all of your devices if you see a yellow question mark?or exclamation mark ! or red x
right click to reinstall drivers or
if you can see your usb but its not working
ports(com&lpt)right click update driver
sometimes the wires inside the cable will be damaged due to bending or stretching or placing heavy equipment upon the cable,
just replace the cable of the hard disk, when you plugged the external disk drive you got that windows could recognize the USB device change the cable everything should work fine again,

check the USB leads that attach to the motherboard usually red-white-green-black make sure they are securely seated and have no dust build up on them dust will cause static and a lot of unforeseen problems also make sure the computers Ram and Cmos battery are securely seated
if this fails to fix the problem
you might have to install a usb 2 or 3 card they are cheap and easy to install you can buy these on Ebay very cheap
hope this helps