How can I get My Western Digital External HDD working again?
Q. I have a Western Digital External HDD, I had it working with my computer when i had XP installed on it, but now that I have vista, I try to plug it into my computer, and all the light is doing is blinking kind of fast. And it is not showing up on my computer.
Does anybody know what to do? thank you.
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Here are the things I would try in order
1) Try another USB port
2) Try unplugging/replugging power to the HDD while it is plugged into USB
3) Right click Computer > Manage > Storage > Disk Management to see if it comes up there as an unmounted drive. If it does, you can usually right click it (It will be called disk 1 or higher generally) and assign it a drive letter.
4 Test it on another computer. If it doesn’t come up there either it could have a bad internal or external connection or be a dead HDD.
External Hard Drives have drivers that they may need to function properly. Try going to WD site and searching for your driver to have your HD to function properly from your USB.
Otherwise there may be a problem with the HD itself, like if you just unplug and replug it a lot without going to My Computer and “Safely remove” it from menu, it can cause the HD to be unreadable and thus needing a format.
If it isn’t a driver problem, best thing to do is try it on a few computers. Go over to your friends house and try it also. If it won’t Read, then you gott format the whole drive.
Good Luck,
Jason
Try it on a computer with XP. If that works then it might be because it’s formatted in FAT rather than FAT32 or NTFS and therefore is unreadable because, possibly you have another NTFS volume mounted and therefore FAT as an external HDD won’t get picked up. You could plug it into an XP computer and then convert to NTFS (right click the HDD in My Computer, go to Properties… it’s somewhere in there I think!)