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External HD No Longer Works With Computer

kegar89, on Oct 22, 2008 8:43:40 pm BST
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Hello,

I plugged my Western Digital external hard drive into my Playstation 3 and my Xbox 360 so I could stream my movies off of it. I went to plug it back into my computer, and now my computer no longer reads it. Is there something I can do, some settings I can tweak somewhere where I can now use my external again on my computer. It still works with my 360 and PS3, just not my computer. I have about 17 GB worth of data on it ranging from pictures, movies and music and I really don't want to format my hard drive. If theres anything I can do to fix this PLEASE let me know. I'm on Windows Vista if you need that information.

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1

xpcman, on Oct 23, 2008 3:55:40 am BST

Since the external drive works on the PS3 - we know it's NOT a problem with the drive itself.

You may have pulled the plug on the drive while it was still writing - always use the "safely remove hardware" icon to power down and disconnect the drive before removing it.

Try another USB plug. Use one on the back of the computer, it would be the best. This has been known to sometimes work.

Try to plug in the USB drive before you turn on the computer. Or if you've done that - try to plug in the USB drive after the computer is on.

Go to device manager , open the USB controllers ,
If you find one with a yellow check mark, uninstall it , then rescan for
hardware changes - Windows should reinstall the USB driver at this point.

   

20

malky, on Jan 18, 2009 1:44:50 pm GMT

BiG thanks xpcman! i had the same problem and fixed it with your simple remedy of changing to another usb drive, in hindsight i should have tried that first but thanks to you for pointing out what should have been obvious to me!!:.)

   

2

kegar89, on Oct 23, 2008 6:11:20 am BST

I uninstalled the device and I searched for changes like you said. It uninstalled properly, then it installed itself properly. I restarted, but the hard drive still isn't showing up. Anything else you have in mind?

   

3

kegar89, on Oct 23, 2008 6:38:07 am BST

I took some screenshots so you can see what I'm dealing with here. I should note that my computer freezes when it tries to recognize the external. Once I unplug the USB from the computer, my computer runs real fast again. I really don't get it. I'm trying everything.

Screenshot #1:
http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/5466/66505160nh6.jpg


Screenshot #2:
http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/1698/76781238bq9.jpg


Screenshot #3:
http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/6551/37045718re5.jpg

^^ Notice that's "My Computer". My external would always show up as "External HD (E:)". Sometimes it doesn't show up and my entire computer just freezes, or other times it will show up as "Local Disk (E:)" and it will tell me I have to format my external. I know there has to be another way around this.

   

4

xpcman, on Oct 23, 2008 8:03:47 am BST

Lets see if you have a master boot record (MBR) problem.

go to device manager - disk drives - Right click your USB drive

select properties - volumes - populate

under "partition" it should list "master boot record"

If it doesn't then you have a MBR problem - but, I can't see how the PS3 can read the drive if the MBR is bad.

   

5

kegar89, on Oct 23, 2008 2:06:54 pm BST

Well, everything listed under Properties is just a single dash mark. I go to click 'Volumes', and everything freezes until I unplug the USB cord. I'm guessing I have an MBR problem? How do I fix this?

   

6

xpcman, on Oct 23, 2008 5:53:16 pm BST

I also think you have a MBR (master boot record) problem - there is a fix - but there is also some danger. Before you try to fix the MBR - have you tried to use the external drive on another computer?

Google MbrFix - download the program - burn it to a CD - boot from the CD (you might need to change the boot order in the BIOS to boot from the CD). I have never used this program and don't know the syntax for the command line interface. You will need to read the instructions.

fix the MBR on drive 2 your E drive (((( NOT on drive 0 which is your C drive))))

   

7

kegar89, on Oct 23, 2008 6:24:47 pm BST

Yeah, I've tried it on other computers. It still doesn't work. I'll try this out.

EDIT: Just tried this FixMBR program, it doesn't work for me. I really don't know what to do. Anything else?

   

8

xpcman, on Oct 23, 2008 7:08:15 pm BST

Sorry i've run out of ideas.

   

9

kegar89, on Oct 24, 2008 3:16:00 am BST

Maybe I'm doing something wrong?

   

10

jorisv, on Nov 15, 2008 3:26:59 pm GMT

I have the same problem, did you already fix it ?

   

11

Tale, on Nov 24, 2008 4:27:19 pm GMT

Well, I used "safely remove" for the first time with my WesternDigital USB HD, as my Linux PC asked me to do that in windows that Ubuntu could mount the HD (“toy can mount this by…. Cmd commands, thanks yeah). So I did, copied some files, but now the USB port I was using (the only one in fornt) wont recognize USB HD. It work on other ports (on the back). I have removed all USB devices from device manager an let windows reinstall those, but no can do, the one front USB port, where I used "safely remove" won't recognize the WD USB HD. All usb sticks work, other USB HD’s work, but this WD won't.

weird

   

12

mmaaxx, on Dec 14, 2008 7:25:59 pm GMT
  • +1

Usb is detecting but not showing the removable icon in my computer AND ALSO IN DEVICE MANAGER AND ALSO IN DISK MANAGEMENT PLZ HELP ME HOW TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM (WESTERN DIGITAL)

   

13

bett, on Dec 28, 2008 8:55:59 pm GMT
  • +1

Me to i have the same problem i can see in my device menager but not icon in my computer
and in my laptop work only in py pc not
plase help
sorry for my english

   

14

J, on Dec 30, 2008 10:38:57 pm GMT
  • +1

I have the same problem with my SimpleTech HD Cherry 320 GB External Hard Drive. My computer is no longer reading it. :( Any help?

   

15

J, on Dec 30, 2008 10:52:55 pm GMT

Ok Gang.
I was able to fix this problem successfully! :D

Here are the simple steps:
1) Go to My Computer
2) Right Click > Properties
3) Click the tab called "Hardware"
4) Click Device Manager
5) Locate your External Hard Drive. a.k.a (USB Mass Storage Device)
6) It should have a red X. Click the drive.
7) Enable it

Your problem should be fixed. :)

   

16

Jack, on Jan 1, 2009 1:29:34 pm GMT

FAIL the drive wouldnt be disabled with an X this is still a problem for me anyone have any other tips or tricks ?

   

17

utaeladil, on Jan 6, 2009 3:00:45 pm GMT
  • +2

Did you say whether or not you have tried your external drive on another computer? If so, does it do the same thing on the other computers as it is now doing on yours, or does it work on other computers right now?

You said the whole computer is freezing when you plug it into the USB? I have worked with many internal HD's (I am a PC repair tech) and sometimes I will often plug the internal drive into a USB adapter so that I can attempt to backup data for people when we know the drives are failing. More often than not, when the hard drives are starting to have a mechanical failure, when they are plugged into the USB port they act exactly as you are describing. Exclamation points in device manager, or unrecognized usb device...computer freezing until the device is disconnected. Sometimes I have left a drive plugged in for hours and windows finally unfreezes and it attempts to mount the drive, but usually it doesn't matter much when they get that far off.

You say you have a WD hard drive? What model is it? Is it a true external drive or just some IDE internal drive that you have connected to a USB bay or adapter? Is the drive still under warranty? Did it get dropped or fall or anything when you had it connected to the 360 / PS3?

It could be that if it is having mechanical failures, the PS3 and 360 are somehow mounting it differently or in a way that it would only experience problems if it ran across a file sitting on a bad sector or something. Since the PS3 and 360 could not run a scandisk or repair or anything, maybe thats why the drive appears to mount, where windows may be trying to figure out whats wrong with it and fix the problem during mounting.

If your drive fails to load in ANY computer then I would consider a replacement. Hopefully it is still under warranty. If it will load on another computer, you may want to go ahead and start getting files backed up from it while its not too late.

Also, I do not think this applies to you based on what you have described, but I noticed a few other posts here and this may help them. For people that plug a USB drive in and it looks good in device manager but just doesn't have a drive letter, sometimes windows tries to give your external device the same drive letter as something else (like a CDROM or another internal drive). When that happens, the internal drive takes precedence. You have to tell windows to give your external device another drive letter. The easiest way to do this is to right click on MY COMPUTER and go to MANAGE. Then go to DISK MANAGEMENT. There you should see your USB drive listed. I can't remember off-hand if it will show the drive letter or not if its taken the same letter as another disk, but you can right click on the USB drive and tell it "CHANGE DRIVE LETTER AND PATHS" and it will give you the opportunity to change it to an unused drive letter. I like to set my USB drives pretty high, like W, X, T, or something... this particular issue occurs more often if you frequently unplug or move the USB drive around and also have other devices that may from time to time change their drive letter.

I hope this helps! I would post a link to my website / forum but I am not sure if that is even allowed, but my website is also a forum based around PC repair. If you would like the link to it I would be happy to provide it directly to you. I can answer things more quickly there usually. Let us know how it goes and good luck, but it sounds like a failing drive to me.

   

18

sloakum, on Jan 9, 2009 8:53:56 pm GMT

Thank you utaeladil.

I had exactly the problem described in your 2nd last pararaph, and was baffled, as usual.

I had an external hard drive which was assigned a drive number and when I added a partition on the internal drive, it took the drive letter of the external drive and so the external drive did not show in My Computer any more.

Following your clear instructions, the problem was fixed.

You may have saved me hours of fiddling around.

Thank you so much!

   

56

mars, on Jun 25, 2009 1:01:07 am BST

I read all the forums from you i have the same problem just the thing is haven't tried on ps3 ..can you please help me out in a little simple way how to show the drive in the computer i have everything in my hard drive so please help me ...ill wait for your reply thank you

   

22

Farnsworth, on Feb 2, 2009 7:02:32 pm GMT

Hey utaeladil, I had the same problem with an external USB drive and just tried your solution of using "Change Drive Letter and Paths" in the disk management. Unfortunately it doesn't work. I can right click on my usual C drive and get that option, but when I right click on the USB drive the only option that pops up is the very un-helpful "Help".

The way the drives show up in disk management is bizarre. They show up as two separate volumes in the list above, but in the chart below they both show up side-by-side as "Disk 0". One with the drive letter C, and one with no drive letter at all. It will let me change the drive letter of C, but not of the other disk.

Any other ideas? I'm desperate. :)

   

26

utaeladil, on Feb 4, 2009 9:03:26 pm GMT
  • +2

I am not sure why yours is showing up like that farnsworth...but to me, it sounds like what you are seeing is NOT your external drive at all, instead it almost sounds like you are looking at your main C: drive and it is partitioned... if its like many I have seen, the main partition is almost the entire size of the drive, and the remaining part may be listed as UNKNOWN or may say something like 8mb UNALLOCATED... usually Windows will only show a single DRIVE per each line, and each partition of that drive is listed along side of any partitioned drive letters.

When you plug in or unplug the USB drive, do you hear windows make the USB connect or disconnect sounds?

I would first check the device manager. Open device manager (you can right click on MY COMPUTER and go to MANAGE and then click DEVICE MANAGER) and then plug in or unplug the drive while you have the device manager open. If you don't notice anything happening there, maybe expand the USB section and then plug in or unplug and see if you see anything new appear or disappear in there.

If you see a device appear anywhere in the device manager that has a yellow question mark or exclamation point on it when you are plugging in the drive, then you may have a problem with drivers for that device. I guess before I could guess about any more, you may want to check device manager and see if the device is doing anything when you plug in or unplug and let us know, and maybe we can go from there.

   

29

SpEEd_NiNjA, on Feb 11, 2009 3:58:36 am GMT
  • +2

Now i have the same problem. 250+Gb worth of stuff on my 1Tb WD external HDD. Its been working perfectly up until a few days ago where i am unable to access any of the data.

Occasionally it comes up with an error something along the lines of "E:/Folder is not accessable. This maybe caused by a I/O error" or something like that. When i plug it in it always goes through the autoplay stuff of detecting the files in which it takes 10x as long as what it used to. Then there the problem of windows wanting to reformat the drive.

I have tried all of utaeladil's fixes which none work. Currently running windows XP if that info is needed.

Any chance of a hand please? As i dont want to loose 250Gb of data that is on there. This is extremely frustrating and annoying the crap outta me.

   

24

JBC3D, on Feb 4, 2009 1:48:07 pm GMT
  • +1

I have had this problem in the past with a flash drive. I just had this problem with my WD external hard drive and I followed you directions to change the drive letter. It worked. Thank You very much. I would like a link to your website.

   

25

HW, on Feb 4, 2009 8:50:03 pm GMT

The link to the website is:

http://haroldweaver.com

   

48

sonfeli, on May 12, 2009 10:56:56 pm BST

I already change the driver letter but now it says that I need to formating the device. I CANT because there is a lot of files alredy saved in this device. What can i do?

   

57

mars, on Jun 25, 2009 1:15:57 am BST

Hi utaeladi actually i have a same problem with my wd i tb hard drive i read your solution it seems it works can you please tell me in little bit brief because i',m not too good in computer like where to go where can i find disk defracments or what was it ...there is safely remove icon only no drive in my computer and while i pop in it just makes a usb recognition sound then hard disk seems not functioning because it doesn't make any processing sound..
help me please
do a big favor

   

58

mars, on Jun 25, 2009 2:38:23 am BST
  • +1

Hi utaeladi once again i did all the things you asked to in other posts but when i tried to change drive letter the thing is my external hard drive doensn't show up in disk management it just shows WD in device manager=disk drives....i don't know whats wrong i thing only WD hard disk are facing the same problem i tried connecting in other computer,uninstalling the usb cable and rebooting it nothing work i haven't tried MBR and i don't know how to do do you reckon you can help me with this or any kind to fic it please ..
you seem really generous to me i have really big faith in you please

   

70

pavels59, on Aug 24, 2009 12:50:53 pm BST

Can you email to pavels59@yahoo.com a link to your website / forum so I can ask you some additional questions regarding this issue with external hard drive. thanks in advance. Pavel

   

74

euphoric, on Sep 27, 2009 5:48:06 am BST

I have the same WD "local disk " problem on a larger scale .. my externa hard drive is a WD Book of 1000 GB half of which if ful of media files .. and now it wont work !!
no sounds are emitted when the device is plugged and when i plug it an auto run window appears but only the flash light thing is moving it does not show the files being scanned like it usually does ,
i tried doing the population step from (my computer -> properties _> hardware -> deice manager -->disk drives , i choose my external device , did a right click and choose properties and then the populate ) a message appeared : "volume information for this disk cannot be found . this may happen if the disk is a 1394 or a usb device on a windows 2000 machine ."
i do not know what this means but i was hoping that u do ..
ans one more thing when i tried then WD diagnostics program and did the full scan it started well and went smoothly through 25% then it stopped and a message popped ou that said too many bad sectors ..
i am sure that the device was not moved or tempered with !
please please please help me fix it !! without loosing the data .. and if by chance the data was lost is there a way to retrieve !!!!!

   

19

Pippin, on Jan 12, 2009 9:20:47 pm GMT
  • +2

I actually had the EXACT same problem. It is really annoying. You want to play videos on your XBOX but then you also want to be able to USE your hard disk after you do this. I'm not really sure what the deal was but it took a bit of messing around to fix the problem. First off, I went into my device manager and deleted the USB mass storage device and the USB controllers for the front buses, then restarted. This sadly still didn't work. So I when I searched more I found many people saying it could be a lack of power problem. I wasn't really in the mood to do a full power supply change so I thought that was stupid. Anyways after messing around I finally decided to make sure nothing else using power was connected to the front USB port and BINGO my WD passport drive was working. I guess it was a power issue after all. Now whenever I have both the printer and the USB drive plugged in the USB drive always messes up. Unless the USB drive was plugged in first. Its all very stupid. I guess the moral of the story is, that you don't want to have two power consuming devices plugged into the front ports. If you are using back ports I really don't know. But I hope that helped anyways.

Cheers

   

23

lifeisgood, on Feb 3, 2009 11:31:46 am GMT
  • +1

Try install net framework 3.5 from WINDOWS UPDATE'MICROSOFT'.
it works for me.

   

21

Mika, on Jan 29, 2009 8:04:31 pm GMT
  • +14

Ohh man, you sure know how to help people :) thank you alot utaeladil!

   

27

Dharan, on Feb 7, 2009 9:41:28 pm GMT
  • +1

I followed utaeladil, advice about changing the drive letter and my comp finally found it, I just have one problem. I have about 100g worth of stuff on my external, but I can't get into it because it now wants me to format the drive. Is there anyway I can avoid doing this, and not lose any of my stuff?

   

30

utaeladil, on Feb 11, 2009 6:32:50 pm GMT

Hmm Dharan, it sounds like the drive you are having trouble with may actually be experiencing a mechanical failure. Especially with it re-autorunning and taking much longer than it should. And if Windows sometimes wants to format the drive (that you know has data) then I would say thats another sign :( You may want to start getting some stuff backup up from that drive, incase it fails completely. If it's a newer drive with any warranty, you may want to start with checking with the manufacturer for a replacement. Good luck backing up the data, but it really sounds like that external drive may be on its last legs. :(

   

28

xpcman, on Feb 7, 2009 11:59:21 pm GMT

Got to this site - thier software may help you recover your data

http://www.partition-recovery.com/

Good Luck

   

31

greek, on Feb 14, 2009 5:47:49 am GMT

Wow this crap jut happened to me also...it went from the name 750 too Local Disk k: and i think it was after updating my windows xp crap...i tried system restore..didnt do much....

but i tried most everything suggested and nothin..i tried doing a disk check with tuneup utilities and when i did my external it said no drive ineserted or something....same happenswhen connected to a diff laptop..

please help

   
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