My friend had a 750GB WD Mybook External Hard Drive, it is a SATA drive.
I had a similar model and we tried my AC adapter in his external (he forgot his at the time), the blue light blinked instead of being steady and we unplugged it. We could smell something burning in the external later.
We took apart the external and we think the usb power and reader (not sure) is fried, but we are hoping the drive is still good.
We are looking for the simplest way to hook it up to a computer to check if the HDD is still good. We can either hook it up interally or externally to a computer for testing.
all you need is a usb sata adapter like below
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=2020&cat=HDD I have my mediaPC running with 2 hard drives internally using these type of adapters (just route the usb cables to the back of the computer) There reliable if the drives are only used as a data/storage drive. Basically they make your drive act like an external USB drive, but they are installed inside your computer.
The usb adapters and also the PCI sata cards, I wouldn't recommend those for boot drives. They usually don't show up in the BIOS during bootup.
I would check on the label of the drive to see if there are any jumper specifications...some USB-to-SATA adapters only support SATA150. I know that the mybook 750 has had a lot of complaints even without power overloads...this may be because of incorrect jumper settings from the factory, or it might just be the case itself.
