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Hard Drive not seen when Connected to USB Port
I have a Western Digital WD5000AAKX hard drive that I was using via an adaptor connected to an external USB port.
One day the drive could no longer be seen by my PC running Windows XP. And also not by my PC running Windows 10. At least not completely. From my desktop I can click it off so I can "Safely remove" it, but it doesn't show up in "My Computer". I was using a cheap adapter from China. I think the drive when it was working was running hot. Any guesses on whether or not the drive is recoverable or toast? Thanks. Darren Harris Staten Island, New York. |
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Hard Drive not seen when Connected to USB Port
wrote:
I have a Western Digital WD5000AAKX hard drive that I was using via an adaptor connected to an external USB port. One day the drive could no longer be seen by my PC running Windows XP. And also not by my PC running Windows 10. At least not completely. From my desktop I can click it off so I can "Safely remove" it, but it doesn't show up in "My Computer". I was using a cheap adapter from China. I think the drive when it was working was running hot. Any guesses on whether or not the drive is recoverable or toast? Thanks. Darren Harris Staten Island, New York. Normally, there's no SMART passthru over USB. Pulling the drive from the enclosure and connecting it to a SATA port, might give you better access to it. SMART over SATA, could be reviewed via the Health tab in HDTune. http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe ******* Disk Management has a status of "Online" or "Offline". The Offline value can be forced by the user, while in Disk Management (i.e. to make it easier to get Safely Remove to work perhaps). But if one of the drive numeric identifiers is the same as some other drive (perhaps bad cloning software), then the second disk drive will be forced offline by the OS. You cannot force that drive online again, unless the (apparently) identical drive has been unplugged with the power off. When Offline, the partitions on the drive do not show up in My Computer. Whether a drive is online or offline, it should show up in Disk Management, with the partition table contents showing. So at least you have some idea what needs to be put Online. You should be able to see D: in Partition Management, but it only shows up in My Computer if none of the rules for mounting it are violated. ******* On a modern machine, a USB hard drive may be seen at BIOS level. In the popup boot menu perhaps (press F8 or F12 or F2, depends on brand). If this happens, it means the drive has responded to at least the "identify yourself" query. A drive will *not* respond to such a query, if it is not healthy. The drive will try to "hide" itself if it's failing the simple tests the drive uses at startup. The Service Area (SA, track -1) must be read by the drive, before the entire firmware inside the drive is available and it becomes visible. If the heads won't mount, the SA is damaged, it remains invisible. The enclosure USB processor also has firmware. It's not unheard of, for the enclosure chip to get erased. I had that happen to an enclosure using a Cypress branded USB chip. A recipe on the Internet told me how to re-flash the config info and make it visible again. Took about 10 minutes or so to fix, and a while with ye old Google to find the recipe. ******* While I might suggest TestDisk at a point like this, the fact you're getting some response in Windows 10, means you should return to Disk Management there and have a look. https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk TestDisk is available for multiple platforms. It's on Linux LiveCDs by default. Normally it rebuilds a partition table if it got damaged, but I don't recommend that unless you know *exactly* what the table is supposed to look like. The program will detect phantom partitions that were deleted three years ago, which can cause havoc if you accept the new partition table (partitions will get damaged). But the program, once it's detected a partition, also has an option to go look at the files. You can copy and paste files off the disk using that interface. You could probably copy the entire drive, if you had a single partition at the top that needed to be copied. It's not practical to copy the entire OS (System32, WinSXS) as there are lots of "tricky" types in there that are hard to copy properly. But it will allow recovery of your personal files and email database or the like. You can certainly copy the entire drive, but don't expect the copy of the drive made, to be bootable. Now, if that happened here, I'd boot my Macrium backup software emergency CD and try and make a backup image of the external drive, and store it on some other drive. This would give me more freedom later, to reformat, Secure Erase, or otherwise play rough with the drive contents. If you can at least get some evidence the drive is present, it's not time to panic yet. If it didn't show up in any OS, I might be tempted to dig a hole in the back yard for it... Hook the drive up to a SATA port, to make sure it's not an enclosure issue, if it completely disappears. In some cases, it's a bad power supply on (or outside) the enclosure. Paul |
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Hard Drive not seen when Connected to USB Port
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