Western Digital 1.5 unrecognized

I am having a serious problem with my western digital external drive. I have tried so many things I don't know what else to do. I can't seem to be able to access my external at all it worked at first (I bought it in January 2010) I put some files to save and now it doesnt work at all. The last time I used it was to update some files to put there. Now I can't access it the light turns on. It seems like it something happens because when I plug it on the computer it does a sound and sometimes it seems like its installing a driver and its called "initio default controller" after that it doesn't seem to benefit me. The light is just on not blinking or anything. Its a western digital element. I tried it on 3 computers windows 7 and one windows vista and nothing. I don't know what else to do I have so many important files I don't know if its the end of the external or what it can be. Also it doesn't even show on disk management like its not there. Would linux help here? Help appreciated thanks.

 

The drive may have crashed or the controller board for the drive may be bad. I'd tell you to take it apart and remove the bare drive and plug it in to your pc with another adapter but I think the Element series uses a proprietary interface (not SATA or IDE), which is basically soldered from the drive itself to the controller board. You may want to take it apart and check anyway. Another thing you may want to do is download Hiren's Boot CD and try that. It has a live version of Linux as well as a bunch of hard disk diagnostics and recovery tools. Next step if drive is dead and data recovery is really important would be to send it out to a data recovery place which can get expensive. Good luck, hope you can recover your data.

 

Thanks for the wonderful advice. I think the guy of western digital told me I might of messed up the controller board. I opened the computer and it doesnt seem to have sata nor ide (I didn't unplug the screws didn't want to go that far). I am going to try hiren's boot and see how it goes. I also tried a computer with windows vista again and it actually gives me in device manager that it shows the usb port as unknown so it reads it however it doenst seem to be recognized since windows attempts to update it but nothing (windows 7 wouldnt do that). So I don't know exactly how bad the external is if I have any chance of getting the information. The last choice as you meant is a data recovery place I called one number and yes you are right they are very pricey I never expected the prices varied so high. I will attempt those tools thanks once again.

 

its possible your external may need a firmware update. with mine the esata would always corrupt files during transfer. i did a firmware update and it fixed the issue. i have a friend with the same drive i own and his would not power on with esata and the update fixed it too.

we both have a western digital my book so this might not work for you but i guess its worth a shot?

 

I checked and got all the downloads my external had available. I also mentioned this to the western digital agent and he said that the drivers were built in or something. I also did research and nothing on the western digital element for drivers.