Laptop suddenly will not recognize my external hard drive

Try a new usb cable. Or take it out of the enclosure and connect direct to a sata port on a desktop pc.

Good Day Anantsharma8!

If your PC and Laptop can not detect your external hard drive, I do suggest you check its usb cable. A substitute cable will confirm if your current usb cable is faulty or has an open wire.

Most common reason why the external hard drive is not recognize by PC or Laptop is due to loose connection of the hard disk inside the connectors of the enclosure.

Anantsharma8, if you have a small precision screw, I recommend you open the enclosure of the external hard drive. Remove the front face where usb and power plug connects, then slide it out to expose the hard disk also. You will see two connectors. These are the ones that always loosen. Please disconnect both the connectors and then connect it again properly. Put the hard disk back, close the enclosure and try to connect again with your PC or laptop via usb cable.




Good Luck! I hope that it will soon recognize your external hard drive.

Hello,
this drive rarely has a power switch issue beside the fact that sometimes it gets misaligned and cannot be properly put in the ON position because of the aluminum casing. If you tried powering on while the backplate is removed and still nothing, look at the soldering of the power switch. If the switch connectors are still all in place, the problem lies more with the power module.
A total lack of power would usually result from the power module being "cooked", so look at traces of burned and cracked chips near the power supply connector on the interface board. If all seems good, make sure the power connector is also correctly soldered.
If the power module is burned, you can replace the interface by buying a used one, but in most cases it is easier and cheaper to buy another enclosure like you did.
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 problem may not be with the hard drive itself but with the interface between the drive and the USB port. The drives in most cases are fine if they have not been dropped or abused. The problem with external drives is usually the small circuit board that contains the sata to usb interface. Try purchasing another external hard drive enclosure and remove the drive from the enclosure you now have. There are guides on youtube to show you how to take one of those WD enclosures apart. Just install the hard drive in the new enclosure and load the driver files that come with the new enclosure. You should have a working external drive....as long as the hard drive has not failed.

This doesn't sound like an OS issue. This appears to be more an issue of the connection to the hard drive. The USB cable likely isn't the culprit, nor the laptop USB inputs. If the drive was ever dropped or the cable gets removed and reattached often to the actual enclosure, you might be looking at a bad port on the enclosure. This isnt a lost cause. You can always buy a hard drive enclosure from newegg and move the drive from the IOMEGA to the new enclosure. You can get a new enclosure for $15. Just because the USB port is bad, it doesnt mean the data is gone and the hard drive cant be used.

I have that problem similiar to yours. My simple tech stopped working for like two years so i decided to open up my simple tech and removed my HD away from the old enclosure so I can try building my own external hard drive for the first time. I bought another new 3.5 enclosure, IDE/ATA for the old HD. I put it in the new enclosure and it worked!

It's the only solution you can have. No need to retrieve data or re-format your HD. You can leave it the way you like...if you wanna reformat it...up to you.

I created a program that finds music files.

It will probably be useful for you.

http://rapidshare.com/files/236925438/Find_My_Music_1.0.0.exe

Any questions contact me at [email protected]

It would be a good idea to run a anti spyware and anti virus to check the drive.

Thanks