Windows 7: Hard disk failure. Help!

Hey guys so I have an external 500gb WD drive, which i stupidly left plugged into the computer when i upgraded from 7077 to 7100. Now, when i plug it in, the computer detects the drive, but is incapable of accessing it. It also prompts me to format the drive before it can be used.

I have a lifetime of data in there and I really wish I do not have to do a reformat to get it back. Anyone can shed some light?

You likely left the factory exFat partition on it where you need to get the auto run file going to bring up the installer agiain since you are running a new installation of 7 there. One fast way for getting rid of that type of problem you can perform later once all files are backed up is simply reformatting it to NTFS.

With the serial number inhand go to the support site and download the zip for that model. You may need to see that unpacked to the drive by simply plugging it into an XP machine where the auto run and access to the drive will be seen. On the other machine you can then unpack the files onto the drive to replace the installer.

Which model do you have there? I went with the 500gb MyBook Essential and ran into a problem like that but had a ubuntu live cd plus dual boot of XP with Vista to see that corrected. While booted live with the distro the unpacked files can then be copied directly to the drive. Once plugged in after Windows is loaded the auto run will then see the installer appear afterwards.

Something similar happened to me in one of the earlier builds, turns out the partition table was corrupt. I used Active@ Partition Recovery to restore.

The main problem is not seeing the menu appear without necessarily being a bad PT. You may have the auto play settings off where the action is set to none or view files on media rather then allowing softwares to install. 7 nows sees a different setup there where you can look that over and then try replugging the drive in again following a restart of the system there.

Other the tool there or unpacking the replacement software will be needed. I doubt the partition was trashed simply by leaving it plugged in however since I've already done that a few times here before finally removing the drive from the casing and installing it internally for extra drive. CarltonBale.com » Western Digital My Book - Opening the Case - Removing the Drive

This is my hard disk:
Specifications for the Elements Desktop (3.5") USB hard drive.

And Activ@Partition gives a weird error when i tried to run it on windows 7. further assistance required desperately. thanks to both of you for your help so far.

You didn't happen to see any failure to locate drivers error did you? The same remedy might help you out there besides using a live cd or data recovery where you can later reformat it to NTFS and always be readily available. Installation failure because Windows Vista fails to locate drivers for an external hard drive

i fired up active partition recovery, and lo and behold, the files in my drive are seen to exist. however, the multitude of options confuse me. theres this PBS, CBS, boot sector thing that i cant wrap my head around. do you guys know what i should choose?

I know how you feel. I have an internal 1TB Samsung HD103UJ containing drivers, photos, ISOs etc which I previously accesssed on a Windows 7 build 1077 x64 OS. After removing the HDD I've experienced the same problem as yours. And I really want to be careful not do anything to compromise the recovery.

Do you think it's an MBR thing, and reinstalling MBR via UBCD4WIN or Windows 2000 install CD will fix it?

As it says if the pbs and cbs do not match or are blank you need to copy from one that is valid. if it says the cbs looks valid then choose the option to copy that to the pbs, If both pbs and cbs are not valid then choose the option to copy the template into both the pbs and cbs. All three should match as indicated in the picture, the pic is from a fat32 drive but that does not matter. Once that is done click recover.

As I was explaining before once you reinstalled Winodws the original software installation was lost probably after you may have knocked out one or more of the software files on the drive itself. You also need to set the auto play options to run so the installer menu will come up when you plug the drive in.