WD USB external hard drive unreadable: Help!!

demis001 · 05-25-2009, 10:54 PM

About a year ago I bought a Western Digital Passport, 250 GB. I used without any problem till memorial day. When I plug in yesterday, the "Safely Remove Hardware" says that it's there. But the drive volume is represented with weird symbols. I went to Device Manager and looked under Disk Drives, and the drive shows up. I click on properties and click "Populate". It says that the drive type is unknown, status is unreadable, partition style not applicable, the capacity is 0, the unallocated space is 0, and the reserved space is 0. The drive is no longer under warranty and Western digital did a crappy job of helping.

I took to my office and test on two window xp computers, the same thing happens. No volume letter and do not allow me to assign a new volume letter. I have a lot of data on it and I want to rescue my data!!!!

Any suggestion please! I was stupid and didn't backed up the data.

Suggestion!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I googled for two days and nothing solved my problem.

G-man88 · 05-26-2009, 12:06 AM

i too have a WD usb hard disk and somthing like this happened to me what i did was i took the power coard as the hdd was on and unpluged it from the back of the hdd kinda like a power cycle and this fixed my problem i hope this helps

demis001 · 05-26-2009, 09:51 AM

My drive is completelly unreadable, I have tried to plug in to at least 10 machine, it all show the same way. The drive show under devic manager but not under derive management. If it show under derive management it is easy to recover the data. I have tried on Linux to recover the data using "ddrescue" and my fedora desktop also did not recognize it. It tried to mount and gave me "Dead device message" when I issue the dmesg.

Bad luck, I don't know what I am going try. It is not easy like yours

Thanks though for your reply!

Any help from GEEK please! I one out there might encounter the same problem before

05-25-2009, 10:54 PM	#1 (permalink)
demis001 Registered User Join Date: May 2009 Posts: 2 OS: XP	WD USB external hard drive unreadable: Help!! About a year ago I bought a Western Digital Passport, 250 GB. I used without any problem till memorial day. When I plug in yesterday, the "Safely Remove Hardware" says that it's there. But the drive volume is represented with weird symbols. I went to Device Manager and looked under Disk Drives, and the drive shows up. I click on properties and click "Populate". It says that the drive type is unknown, status is unreadable, partition style not applicable, the capacity is 0, the unallocated space is 0, and the reserved space is 0. The drive is no longer under warranty and Western digital did a crappy job of helping. I took to my office and test on two window xp computers, the same thing happens. No volume letter and do not allow me to assign a new volume letter. I have a lot of data on it and I want to rescue my data!!!! Any suggestion please! I was stupid and didn't backed up the data. Suggestion!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I googled for two days and nothing solved my problem.

05-26-2009, 12:06 AM	#2 (permalink)
G-man88 Registered User Join Date: May 2009 Posts: 6 OS: Win xp sp2 vista unbuntu	Re: WD USB external hard drive unreadable: Help!! i too have a WD usb hard disk and somthing like this happened to me what i did was i took the power coard as the hdd was on and unpluged it from the back of the hdd kinda like a power cycle and this fixed my problem i hope this helps

05-26-2009, 09:51 AM	#3 (permalink)
demis001 Registered User Join Date: May 2009 Posts: 2 OS: XP	Re: WD USB external hard drive unreadable: Help!! My drive is completelly unreadable, I have tried to plug in to at least 10 machine, it all show the same way. The drive show under devic manager but not under derive management. If it show under derive management it is easy to recover the data. I have tried on Linux to recover the data using "ddrescue" and my fedora desktop also did not recognize it. It tried to mount and gave me "Dead device message" when I issue the dmesg. Bad luck, I don't know what I am going try. It is not easy like yours Thanks though for your reply! Any help from GEEK please! I one out there might encounter the same problem before