WD 2.0TB vanished?

xerus`

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 22, 2005
Messages
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This morning I had a USB card reader that wasn't working on an OSX laptop, so I plugged it into my PC. My PC then went bonkers and everything slowed down to a crawl, so I unplugged the card reader, and the lag didn't let up. I then unplugged everything from the back, including a eSATA hard drive that was connected to the computer through a thermaltake blacx. (weird top loader drive thing)

I plugged the eSATA back in, and it didnt show up. So, I unplugged it, turned it off, plugged it back in, and turned it back on which usually makes it show up again without an issue. Nope.

The hard drive spins up, and makes a somewhat odd sound, but I don't think the sounds its making have changed recently. (Its made these sounds before, but still has functioned fine.) After the hard drive spins up, nothing happens, it doesnt show up. Not in disk management, not in my computer, nothing.

So I tried it with USB, still nothing. After the drive spins up for about 5 minutes, it says it found a USB mass storage device, but nothing shows up past that. It identifies the drive correctly, but says there are no volumes on it.

So now I try it on my macbook in Windows, same result. Try it on OSX, and I get nothing in there. So then I tried it in a windows 7 computer, and it says its trying to install the software drivers for it and eventually fails. I then tried to plug it in via interal SATA, and when the computer boots up its obviously getting hung up on the hard drive. My ASUS Express Gate loading screen lasts for about a minute (usually I barely see the screen) and then when it gets to reading from the disk to boot up, it hangs for about another 60 seconds while the hard drive makes some spin up noises. When I finally get into windows 7, nothing shows up for that hard drive in neither disk management nor my computer.

The drive is a western digital green caviar 2tb which is only a few months old.

I had a hard drive mess up a few months back and I was able to still see it in disk management and use some recovery software to grab the data off of it, but now I have no clue what to do if no computer can see it at all. Is the hard drive just completely fucked from me unplugging the eSATA cable while it was on?

TLDR 2TB eSATA hard drive was unplugged from computer while on, now does not show up in disk management or my computer in windows xp and windows 7. No clue how to recover it.
 
Sounds to me like the controller that you plug the drive into is shot. Try that drive in another enclosure or even better hooked straight up to a mobo.
 
I've tried it both the external eSATA adapter and plugged right into the motherboard of a different computer.
 
I would do either 1) Boot from a live cd and see if I can see it or 2) Run the manufacturers drive checking utilities

Sounds like the drive may be hosed.
 
Yeah, sounds like the flash device reader killed your hard drive and possibly damaged your chipset to boot. Bad luck.
 
Hmm I'm trying to boot into a liveCD of Knoppix but it's getting hung up on "Starting ADRIANE screenreader..." with no progress past that point.

The BIOS can't even see the hard drive so I'm guessing the whole thing is done.

I've heard that WD's RMA system is pretty awesome, but does anyone know what happens to the old hard drive? I'm assuming that the data on this drive is fine, its just inaccessible, and I don't feel too comfortable with all the stories about people buying refurbished hard drives and getting all the data that was on them from the previous owners... : I
 
If it's that big of a concern, the only thing to do at this point (if it absolutely won't work) is to smash it with a hammer, use a huge magnet for a few days, or just not send it back.
 
I don't think I can smash it with a hammer and get a replacement ;p
 
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