Western Digital External Hard Drive Failure

BigO1120

What's up everyone!!??!!

My brother has a WD My Book™ Essential Edition™ 2.0 that crapped out on him just this past week. It will not power on at all when he has it connect via USB. He already got a replacement power supply but the darn thing still doesn't work. He had a lot of information on there and if he goes to a vendor to have his data restored it's going to cost a pretty penny to do.

Is there anything I could try on my end (crack open the HD) before we either spend the $$$ to have the data retrieved?

As always...thanks in advance for the answers.

Sie

Have you plugged the device into another PC?

It may be the USB Hub on the machine, hardware or driver problem and you many end up paying good money to retrieve the information when its not the External Drive thats at fault!

Does the HD power up on its on without being attached to the PC?

Silly question but have you checked the plug socket and tested another one/the fuse?

Just picking at straws cause i know how much they would charge to recover the data

Silver Bullet

I imagine that it's a standard SATA or IDE drive in the enclosure. So you could probably open the case, take the drive out and slave it to the PC. Get the data off of it and send the drive in for warranty replacement.

Sie

I may be wrong but usually opening cases / removing covering etc voids warrenties so you may want to check that before you do it. But it is a possibility, just remember what people post here is just advice and any actions taken are your own.

Silver Bullet

Yes...Sie is right. Call them first and make sure that you can get it replaced under warranty if you do what I suggested.

Otherwise, if they say no and they want to charge you more to recover your data than the drive is worth then I personally would go ahead. That's just me though.

dynamik

http://www.spinrite.info is an excellent recovery tool. I'd give that a shot if you have important data on the drive.

JDMurray

SpinRite is an excellent disk data recovery tool, but it will not work well (or at all) if the problem is caused by a hardware failure. It would be good to first determine if the hard drive itself is damaged or has failed before spending the $$ for SpinRite .

dynamik

JDMurray wrote:

SpinRite is an excellent disk data recovery tool, but it will not work well (or at all) if the problem is caused by a hardware failure. It would be good to first determine if the hard drive itself is damaged or has failed before spending the $$ for SpinRite .

As you can see, my Friday nights consist of having a few beers and posting on TE

You're right, of course. I didn't read the initial post carefully