Hello,

I purchased a WD 1TB Essential Edition 2.0 External HD about 5 weeks ago. It has worked perfectly up until now, but I stopped it from copying a file the other day, and now it won't show up on the computer.
I have spent 2 days trawling through posts on this site as well as many others, tried many Partition recovery programs, data recovery etc etc but nothing finds the drive as it does not show up in My Computer.
In Vista I can find the drive in Disk Management, and it says 'Disk 2 Unknown' I cannot 'initialze' the drive as it states missing sector, or something like that. I therefore cannot change the drive letter etc, even though I don't believe this will work.

I have uninstalled drivers for it, USB hubs etc etc. It connects to the PC but only as 'WD' in disk drives.' 'Populating' the drive shows nothing and everything as 0 etc.

I have over 300GB of photos, music etc etc on this drive, and really do not want to lose it. I would be more than happy to even format the drive, and then try and recover the info, but of course I can't even do that because the computer does not recognize the drive.

As I said before, no progrmas I have tried will actually find the drive. It only shows up but is not accessible at all in Windows. I have tried on 2 different computers, one with Vista, one with XP.

I have read many MBR posts, but they all seem to state that they are for Windows Boot sectors, and my HD is just for storage, so I have not done these. But seeing as it takes a few minutes for Vista to show the unknown drive in disk management, I don't see how these could help.

I tried using a WD program too, that returns the drive to a FAT32 format. This program actually listed the drive, but failed in any attempts.

I have tried cables, power supplys too. Nothing.

If anyone has anything I can try, please help.

Configuration: Windows Vista Internet Explorer 8.0