external hard drive won't read

[sparky3009]

I bought a Western Digital My Passport 1TB about 3 months ago. Just today, I got home and went to sort through pictures I had on the drive and noticed that the hard drive won't read. The computer recognized it and mapped the letter G to the drive. It wouldn't Tell my how big the drive was, how much space was used or how much space was left like it normally does. I opened it and it said there are no files or folders in the drive. Won't let me write to it.

I went to Disk Management, and it showed up in there, but where it should have drive info (capacity, space left, etc), it was all blank. Device manager said 'WD SES Device USB Device' had no driver installed. I downloaded the driver from WD's website, and installed it manually. Now I have no drive. It won't give me any indication from within windows that the drive works. The LED on the drive lights up and I can feel it spinning when I hold the drive.

Anyone have ideas? I'm thinking the drive failed, but it's only 3 months old. I'm SOL if it did die though. Stuck in Iraq on a tiny little base where I can't even send out mail :-(

 

[sparky3009]

Little update on this.... I gave up on trying to get the drive to work. I plugged it into my friends laptop and it didn't work on his either. He has the exact same drive as me (bought them at the same time), I even tried his cable in case for some reason mine was messed up. I've come to the conclusion the drive is done for. Luckily, the nice fellows at Western Digital opened a ticket for me so I can call back when management is open tomorrow and I should be able to have them send me out a drive and give me an additional 2 months to send this drive back.

 

[Old Hippie]

It could be just the controller in the external case and by connecting the drive directly to your MB you could recover your data.

Do yourself a favor when you want an external drive..........

Buy whatever 2.5" or 3.5" laptop/desktop drive you desire and install it in any 2.5" or 3.5" external enclosure.

Now you have an external drive with longer warranty times and you can open the case to troubleshoot without voiding any warranty.