I have a hard drive 500g wd once i give it power it wont turn on make a noise then shuts off. did i lose all my info??

Back up your data. On mac, run disk utility select erase tab select Mac Os Format Click erase.
Once done, you should be good to go

See http://www.fixya.com/support/t2851313-simpletech_portable_drive_use_2_0 Be sure to back up everything you need asap!

Sounds like a drive failure. If it under warranty then its time to trade it in.

There can be 3 possible problems since you hear the clicking sound. 1 is that the drive is not receiving enough power from the power supply and it is attempting to turn on. 2nd is the controller board is damaged and 3rd is the drive itself is damaged. From my experience with WD external drives. the 3rd is my best guess. One thing you can try is to buy an external chassis for the hard drive and take the hard drive out of the My Book and put it in the chassis to see if it works. Get one from a place with a good returning policy would also be good as well

the power supply is probably dead. if its under warranty return it for replacement. if not under warranty have a local technician check the power supply.

Hi stuhubbard. "joul" posted this fix in response to my WD issues. Check it out....

"joul"
I had the same problem today and I solved it...
Go to the Western Digital official website, choose your model and download the driver for win98..it works magically with XP. Fast and easy :)


My WD fixed itself, but this seems like a likely fix if you are still having problems. Perhaps let "joul" know if this is useful for you.

if possible, open the "my Book" and take put the hard drive, connect it ot your PC as secondary internal hard drive.

If the drive has failed there will be no way of completely erasing anything from it. One thing that you can try is placing the drive on the speaker magnets in your car. I've had several hard drives come through my shop that were scrambled because someone left the laptop in the back window of their car and the magnetic field from the speakers erased it. I will tell you that data recovery from failed drives is very expensive, WD isn't interested in the info from warrantied drives, and isn't going to pay to have each returned drive recovered. Keep in mind that WD has thousands of returned drives on an annual basis, and the chances of someone recovering anything from your drive are extremely slim. Besides, WD has a privacy policy that all warrantied drives are to be destroyed. I have WD 250, and there is no way of removing the drive without breaking the case, voiding the warranty, so I don't recommend trying to remove the drive from the case. If the drive has failed it won't matter whether the drive is in the original case or a laptop, it's still not going to work.

Check the USB port on your computer. It's very likely that the problem is there. On my computer USB ports stop working sometimes and the HD does exactly that. HOwever, when i restart the computer, everything works fine.

Hi,

For your 2 queries:
1. The clicking sound is indicative of a hardware failure or the start of one. Considering having it fixed would simply be buying a bit of time and prolonging the inevitable.  The drive even when repaired tends to be suspect and would defeat its very purpose;

2. You can perform the reformat yourself. If the WD would show as a removable drive in your Windows Explorer, right clicking on the assigned drive letter would give you the option to Format it.

Alternately, it might be to your advantage to simply replace the WD. In some instances, it is also possible to just replace the actual HD inside the enclosure.

Hope this be of some help/idea. Pls post back how things turned up or should you need additional information.

Good luck and kind regards.