uRbAnlP

I bought my WD My Book 500GB External NAS about a year ago. It's been running fine until last week when it suddenly stopped working.

I know heat is a problem for external drives so I managed to get a fan about the same width as the drive itself and installed it to suck all the heat out of the case. One morning I found my drive ON and running but inaccessible. I tried everything from unplugging to restarting the device with no luck so I turned off.

After a day or two I decided to take it apart. The drive itself looked fine with no signs of physical damage. Carefully I plugged it into my computer to find out what was going on.

I turned the computer on and lasted a good couple of minutes on the splash screen right after POST. I went to BIOS and checked all 4 drives were OK (My OS drive, 2 extra drives, and my 500). Saved and restarted. Another couple of minutes in Splash until it finally booted to windows.

Right after log on the "New hardware found" bubble appeared trying to install my 500 and a tuner card I haven't be able to find drivers for Windows 7. After about 5 minutes they both failed to install.

I looked into My computer and drive is no there. I looked under Disk Management and drive is not listed, not even when I rescan disks, I went to Device Manager and is not listed but when I try to look for new hardware it tries to install both, my 500 and the multimedia card, and they, again, fail.

The hard drive does not make any weird noises. It spins properly and it's being recognized (With a little trouble) by BIOS.

I know you'll all throw some rotten eggs at me but about 60% of the data is not backed up. I could care less about warranty, what I want is the data.

Any thoughts regarding this would be appreciated.

Thanks.

raptor_pa

Probably a head/preamp failure. Also could be something in the firmware area, the Service Area of the platters. Not something that is a DIY solution unfortunately.