Western Digital External USB Hard Drive Unrecognized in Windows 7

[shawneric]

Just the other day my wife and I are watching several movies on my external hard drive, which has a plethora of movies we've gathered. It's not even that old, less than a year old.

here's what I've done:

I have three computers in our house

-Windows 7 64bit Desktop (custom built)
-Windows 7 32bit laptop (Dell Vostro 1700)
-Windows 7 32bit Toshiba)

Not a single one of these computers even so much as detect the hard drive at all now. I tried a different usb cable as well, and i got nothing. I tried different wall outlets, it still blinks when I plug it in the computer, but the computer doesn't remotely see it.

Here's exactly what happened leading up to this, so no one is confused:

I first noticed a problem when I tried to download a new movie using utorrent. It started the file, and then failed saying something was wrong with like cyncro or something. Whatever, I looked up the error code. Appears others have had this issue as well, so I did what they said, "chkdsk /r" on my hard drive (J:/). It got to step five, but froze there...got nothing, for over 6 hours it sat there and not a thing at all.

So I cancelled it, closed it out, and restarted the computer with the device plugged in.

it reboots, and now...absolutely nothing. It doesn't even see that a drive exists.

like I said, I've changed out the cables, moved power outlets, tried different computers and different ports, and done these steps on each of them:

1. Checked device manager...doesn't even show it on any of the computers.
2. Checked printers and devices..not even a hint.
3. Checked hidden devices on device manager...not even there.

I just recently had another issue. I was trying to get my ALFA AWSU036NHR wifi modem to work, but it wouldn't work. The difference was, I could see the device, the driver just didn't work. I fixed it by finding the driver (which was ridiculously hard to do until I start looking outside of the Alfa network of drivers and looked towards realtech. I downloaded a torrent of driver packs for windows 7 32 and 64, it was in there, problem solved, now it works perfectly.

The external hard drive....can't fix it until I can somehow get the computer to just SEE it.

Any ideas? I have no freaking clue what happened to it or what chkdsk /r did to it, but I would love to get my movies back, i have no copies of these and it almost takes up an enter 2 TB hard drive, so it's a butt-ton of movies and JUST movies.

 

[ICIT2LOL]

Look Shawn I ma no expert but have you tried DISKPART to see if it is in there - I sometimes have this problem and pretty well all the time it will show up in that.

Nb ""
"****" is just to show the letters to be typed not the quotation marks

Start > type "cmd" in search > right click the cmd at the top of the Start menu > left click "run as administrator" > let it work to a balck and white DOS screen > type in "diskpart" > Enter > DISKPART will come up > type "list disk" > Enter it will show all the drives (disks) on or in the machine.

If you know how to snip or capture the screen post back the screen.