Solved External Hard Drive failure. "Bad disk" after power failure

[Shimshom]

Yes just shut down the computer remove the power cable and press the PC ON button for 30 seconds or so to discharge whatever power remains in the system and connect it inside as you would any other SATA hard drive. If you have no more SATA ports just disconnect your DVD drive or secondary drive then reconnect when done saving the data on it. You can also always use it as a secondary drive if it's still healthy enough

 

[Anshad Edavana]

Hi

I would also suggest watching How to Install Internal Hard Drives : How to Connect Serial ATA Hard Drives - YouTube

 

[dime5150]

SUCCESS! I plugged it in to the CD/DVD connection since there wasn't any more available. Looks like i'd have to get an adapter to plug it in to another slot (acer desktop computer). But i'm able to retrieve files.

That being said, can I ever use this drive as an external again? Why does it not function externally any longer?

 

[mjf]

Congratulations - I like success stories. I'm a bit amazed after all the fiddling you hadn't damaged your file system. You are also lucky you have an WD elements since others like WD MyBook include hardware encryption and you couldn't access your data this way.

You can use the drive again by using a third party enclosure or a docking station. I would suggest you make another copy of your most important data and run a drive test when the HDD is sata connected.

 

[Shimshom]

Great news and will be easier to do if it ever happens again

 

[dime5150]

Hey guys. So this is really strange. Did a quick test with HD tune pro. Look what it shows when connected via SATA... I'm confused. What does this mean? Why would it say healthy when SATA but completely bad when USB connected?

 

[dime5150]

I ran the Western Digital diagnostics tool again. However this time it failed with an error on the quick test both times. I think it's safe to say this hard drive is not reliable to put any data on it. I'll be putting data on it and then throwing it in the trash. What a shame. Had it since 2010 and only used 3-400gb of the 1.5 TB! Let me know if there are any other things I should do with it.

 

[Shimshom]

Like all things electronic they eventually seem to fail and go to hardware hell. It might be useful for building a test computer which can be used to test various programs before installing on the main computer but doesn't matter if it falls over otherwise just bury it

 

[dime5150]

I really appreciate everyone's help here. I got to save my data which was the ultimate goal. I found out I had most of it already backed up once. I think I'll be moving some of my most important data to the cloud.

Thanks again guys. I'll mark this as solved.

 

[Ijas619]

It shows that ur disk is unallocated..
So take cmd type diskpart
select ur disk
clean
create partition primary
active
select partition #
format fs NTFS

 

[Anshad Edavana]

@dime5150

Glad to hea that you managed to save all important data from the drive.

@Ijas619

Please read the thread before replying. OP's primary goal is to save data and not destroy it by formatting.

 

[Shunui]

Hello, I had the same problem but it won't work even I connected the HDD itself directly to the MB