1TB WD External Drive Not Working

Hi,

I have a 1TB WD external drive that i was still using until last week when it failed to open. It shows in My Computer as a drive letter J but it doesn't show the usual capacity and free space. Disk management detects it though. Then opening the drive gives me the message that the drive needs to be reformatted before it can be used. I don't want to loose the 900GB files I have in it so I tried some recovery programs like Wondershare but it only recovered 10GB of my files. I'm not really techie so please help me. Thank you so much.

Hi there
1) Unplug the device
2) switch off the computer.
3) re-boot computer with device NOT plugged in
4) plug in device ( preferably on a different USB slot).


If device fails to be recognized go to control panel==>administrative tools===>computer management===>storage disk management. This can sometimes happen too.

If you see a disk without a drive letter right mouse click and you can assign it a letter via a dropdown. Device should then be recognized


If you are STILL getting problems with the HDD try to see if it will work on another machine. If it really fails again then I think your drive is ready for a one way trip to the trash can.

You've got one last trick also -- try running a CHKDISK on the device at the next re-boot and see if the system can find / fix errors.

Drives don't fail very often but they can and do -- so it's always sensible to have backup whether it's an OS or data -- and if it's 900 GB of music / video that's a LOT of re-ripping etc !!!!.

Cheers
jimbo