In the past my WD external hard drive would on and off not be recognized by my computer, sometimes being displayed as 'local disk'. In the last couple days, it would start doing this again. It also would crash my Windows Explorer should I open up my Computer and try to check it there. Sometimes the 'you need to reformat' came up. I used the WD diagnostic and it said the cable was bad, but running a program called Zero Assumption Recovery, it started detecting corrupt sectors - this was when my computer was actually able to acknowledge that it was plugged in. After this, it began to not be recognized in the main Computer window under hard drives. Under Disk Management, it would be 'unknown', and I was unable to initialize it. Populating it shows that it is at '0mb'.
So I tried a semi-last resort and took it out of its casing (I checked warranty on WD's site - no good) and plugged it directly into my computer. Upon turning on my computer, it would stay at the loading screen that is before the Windows icon flash with the little sound effect that leads to the log-in screen, so it was stuck at the bar with the moving greenies - sometimes it would freeze, then the green bars would move again for a while, then freeze. I eventually just turned off the computer because obviously it wasn't working.
Now I'm going to take it in to a computer specialist store and see what they can do, if anything. I have probably 300gb of important stuff on it...I'm terribly sad.
Sounds like you hit all the big ones. The last thing I might recommend is to use a BartToolsPE disk to boot the system from, with the drive connected. If it won't boot like that, you will be in need of professional help.
SATA, so all I did was plug in the necessary bits and restarted my comp. Since I didn't have an extra SATA cable I just unplugged the one from one of my CD drives and used the already enabled SATA slot.
hmm...question: many of the files I transferred to the external before it went bust, I cut and pasted, instead of just copying and then deleting the original file. Is it possible to still use a data recovery program to find these 'cut' files that might still be on my computer?
