Then it will start checking your drive, be patient here because it can take a long long time for this to finish.type in chkdsk #: /R (where you should put drive letter in place of #).What they say is let the drive be checked and repaired by chkdsk: Luckily I saw that my data wasn't lost, because when I plugged the external hard drive in a Macbook Pro, it showed up right away! And I could acces all the files and copy them without any problems!īut then I came across another forum with my solution but it was in Dutch.
Tried everything mentioned on this forum like changing drive letters and disabling in device manager, but nothing seemed to work.
It took two days to copy while HDD is in bottom up position.I had the same problem like many as you, Maxtor 3200 looked like it crashed, it wouldn't show up in My Computer anymore and it would freeze up any pc (tried 3 different ones) as soon as it got plugged in. Copied those using Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier. I copied all the needed files, except two that failed reading at 95% due to bad sectors. The drive was detected and showed in Windows. Holding in this position, I connected the data cable, opened the Device Manager and performed a Scan for HW changes. Surprisingly, the gravitational force made the trick with the heads! The HDD started spinning without clicking. I thought of opening and inspecting the heads and platters (drive has no critical data on it), pulled the HDD out and while holding it bottom up connected it to the power. Could be heads calibration issue or a damaged Service Area that stores manufacture data required for HDD operation. My HDD never fell, nor got a physical damage. A guy from recovery services said, if it's spinning, 99.9% it's not the PCB.
Removing the data cable as WD suggest didn't help. My oldest WD internal drive is 14 yo and all of a sudden it started clicking loudly and shutdown itself after 30sec. Notify them of the problem and the drive will be replaced. Just get onto the WD website and log into the my support section. So for anyone whom does have a backup (and anything important should be backed up) then this is the best way to fix the problem. WD replaced the drives within a few days of me notifying them of the problem as well. Anyway luckily both of effected drives where still under warranty when it happened and both where backed up onto other copies. On a side note I sync the backups using a program called Cronosync which syncs all new and updated files automatically at the click of a button. In the past six months I've had this happen twice so I am thankful that I always keep backups of everything. I have been using WD drives since 2012 and I now have 24 drives in total.
When all three drives are full I send the third drive back to my home country of Australia in case something happens to my drives in Vietnam. I travel regularly for work so I keep three copies of every drive so that I can travel with two drives and leave one behind in case I get robbed while I am travelling. I have a lot of WD drives, I'm a Vietnam based photographer and I use them to store my work on.