Cannot Access External Hard Drive

[smalls0224]

Hello,

I have a Western Digital USB 3.0 external hard drive that I use for media storage. I noticed an issue when I tried to play music from it, WMP and Media Monkey would hang to the point of freezing the system. I restarted my machine and checked the connection on the drive and it wasn't found by Windows.

After restarting both the machine and the drive, Windows does list it as a hard disk drive but trying to access it hangs Windows Explorer because, apparently windows cannot read it and it has asked me to reformat it and have so far declined.

Is there anything that I can do to try to recover my drive without formatting it. I really would like to save my data (100GB). Oh, I am running Windows 7 Home Premium.

Thank you in advance for any advice.

 

[MindoverMaster]

You are using a USB 3.0 port, correct?

 

[smalls0224]

Yes, the drive came with a USB 3.0 pci card and I've been using that to connect to my machine for a while. But that shouldn't matter too much because it is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 as well. (I've used with my laptop as well).

 

[MindoverMaster]

It is back compatable, but not all features will be present.

The same problem we used to have with USB 2.0 devices and USB 1.1 ports. It did not work in some cases. In others, not to its full potential.

 

[smalls0224]

I have connected the drive exactly as I have previously, using the USB 3.0 slot on my desktop. To test that it was not a desktop issue, I connected it to the USB 2.0 slot on my laptop and got the same result.

 

[MindoverMaster]

I think changing it from USB 3 to 2 confused it. Get a Ubuntu BootCD and burn that to CD. Try booting off that. See if it can detect the drive.

 

[smalls0224]

I tried that and just like in Windows, it sees a drive, it just cannot access anything on it. It does not show it as a usable drive.

 

[smalls0224]

Okay, so I've tried photorec and testdisk, they both found only bad sectors. Pandora didn't work because it said the drive wasn't ready. So I gave up and tried to format it and recover the data that way, still no dice. Windows, nor any other program can format the drive. Is there anything else I can do to save the data? Would it be worth it to try the Geeksquad or should I just send in for a replacement?

 

[MindoverMaster]

Just RMA it to WD. GeekSquad can't do squat.

 

[smalls0224]

So, my data is just completely gone gone...right?