WD external won't work anymore

Hi there a couple of things happened to my WD external today. First I dropped it, not a big drop, plugged it in and it was still working. Later on I was copying a dvd to it, but canceled mid-way. I then tried plugging it into another laptop and nothing started happening, I tried opening my computer folder up but it just froze and did nothing. So I unplugged the WD and tried re-pluggin it into the laptop. This time the blue light doesn't light up anymore. It now just makes a little noise like its starting up and then just goes dead. Does anyone know what has happened and how this can be fixed please?

 

I guess dropping it had disturbed a power connection the the hard drive, which is now making intermittent/no connection. Since it's a sealed unit, I doubt you can open it without wrecking it, so I think you'll probably need a new drive.

 

Take the external apart, it is most likely a connection issue between the sata to usb adapter and the harddrive. It is very easy to take apart, just undo the plastic snaps and the top rotates off.

If your desktop has a sata port or you have another usb to sata adaptor, I recommend taking the harddrive out of teh external and see if it is recognized by your desktop.

Good luck,

K-TRON

 

Dude, the same thing happened to mine. It fell off a mini-ATX tower (my father INSISTED upon keeping it on top) and stopped working for a little bit, then after a reboot everything was fine for a while.

I left it alone and it started acting up like you've described, freezing up my computer and if it does get recognized it won't say how much disk space is available/used and it is unresponsive.

So I left it alone for a week and it looked like it was fixed. Now whenever I plug it in and start playing a movie or something off of it, it looks like I can watch about 5-10 minutes of a movie before it acts like it's "buffering" the movie as if I'm watching it online.

I guess I'll try K-TRON's tip. If you have a MyBook like I do, you just take of the rubber seal around the side and eventually the two plastic parts will unlatch (you just have to figure out which way to pull them).

If that doesn't work, I'll call tech support/get a new one. :/

 

If your unit is under warranty, I suggest not trying to pull unit apart, send it in or you may be denied replacement.

If out of warranty or you want to try to recover non critical data, go for it.

 

Thanks alot for your suggestion k-tron. This has happened before to a 2.5" external I had, was copying a dvd over and it got disconnected, computer couldn't read the disk until I formatted it. Hopefully I do not have o do that again.

 

My external started to appear again but I cannot open it. It still kinda freezes and slows my laptop up and when I tried opening it a message appears notifying me of an 'I/O error'. Can this be fixed by getting a new usb to sata adaptor?