External Hard Drive Stopped Working

Hi, I have a Western Digital Elements 1TB Drive that just stopped working yesterday morning. I went to open a file on it and my computer crashed and the drive no longer appears under my computer on my desktop, my laptop and also my brothers desktop. When I plug USB cable for the drive into the computers, it says installing drivers. That finishes but nothing appears like I said.

I went into disk management under computer management and the drive shows up but it's not intialized and when I try to do that, it says Incorrect Function.

I ran the W.D. Diagnostic program on the drive and I get the following results



Test Option: QUICK TEST
Model Number: WD
Unit Serial Number:
Firmware Number: 1.75
Capacity: 0.00 GB
SMART Status: Not Available
Test Result: PASS
Test Time: 18:14:54, October 19, 2010

Test Option: EXTENDED TEST
Model Number: WD
Unit Serial Number:
Firmware Number: 1.75
Capacity: 0.00 GB
SMART Status: Not Available
Test Result: FAIL
Test Error Code: 08-
Test Time: 18:15:01, October 19, 2010

I'm not sure what else to do, this is my backup drive for my photography business so it's important that I find a way to get my photos and everything else I have on it back. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

first thing first, is the hard drive still under warranty?

first thing first, is the hard drive still under warranty?

No it's not, according to WD it went out of Warranty in April

If this is not a mechanical failure then I have had luck with Find and Mount.

If this does recover\enable you to see the drive and it`s contents I would immediately back them up to another drive.
A live CD may work also. Let us know what happens.

If this is not a mechanical failure then I have had luck with Find and Mount.

If this does recover\enable you to see the drive and it`s contents I would immediately back them up to another drive.
A live CD may work also. Let us know what happens.

Find and Mount won't work, I get an error code on startup

"There were errors on start (Device Driver service cannot be started. Error Code: 577) Program will terminate

Edited by JustinBerl, 19 October 2010 - 09:53 PM.

What OS are you running? Is it 64 bit?

What OS are you running? Is it 64 bit?

Yup, Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit

From looking up the error it would seem that Find and Mount is not 64bit compatible.

2 options that I can think of. One is if you have access to a 32bit system. Trying Find and Mount with it and the troubled drive.
The other is using a live CD such as Ubuntu. Download it and follow the instructions found on the same page to create either a bootable CD or flash drive.

If all else fails and as a last resort you can try freezing the HDD. Put it in a ziplok bag and put it in your freezer overnight. It might give you 15-20 mins working time to recover your data.
I stress that this may not work at all and should only be used as a last resort.

From looking up the error it would seem that Find and Mount is not 64bit compatible.

2 options that I can think of. One is if you have access to a 32bit system. Trying Find and Mount with it and the troubled drive.
The other is using a live CD such as Ubuntu. Download it and follow the instructions found on the same page to create either a bootable CD or flash drive.

How will ubuntu work with an external hard drive?

Ubuntu is based on a different file system. Neither Fat, Fat32 or NTFS. It will not care if there is any file corruption on the storage drive.

How you would use the live CD is to boot from it in a PC which has the faulty drive attached to it. If the external drive is not suffering a mechanical failure then it should be able to see it`s contents and allow for the transfer to another media.

If it isn't covered under warranty anymore then there is no harm in opening the enclosure and removing the drive to see if you can at least pull your data off of the hard drive itself. Sometimes USB controllers on external hard drives fail. The data is still there but it will never mount properly in Windows.