As new 1tb external HD not accessible

Hi all

Purchased a WD 1TB portable external HD in early January.

After using it without problem for two weeks, the drive is now not accessible. I have tried on three Windows 7 machines.

I can see the drive in Device Manager under 'WD SES Device' (drivers install correctly).

In Disk Management, I am prompted to Initialize disk ('You must initialize disk before Logical Disk Manager can access it'). I am then told 'The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error'.

Below is what appears in Disk Management:


Any help would be appreciated.

 

Have you tried connecting the hard drive to a different USB port? If you have a desktop, try connecting to a port in the back of the computer.

Do you need to retrieve data from the hard drive?

 

Here's one WD take on "Where to find a driver for a WD product or the operating system (OS) fails to recognize a WD drive".

I have my doubts as to whether it will be useful though.

 

I have tried on several Win7 computers all with the same issue.

Data retrieval is preferred but not necessary. Do you know of any formatting solutions that might work?

It's not a driver issue as the driver installs fine on different computers... however the hard drive is still not recognizable.

I think one possibility is that the hard drive has failed - but it's less than a month old!!

 

If this does not work, take the drive back to the place of purchase.

Download the bootable version of Partition Wizard.

http://www.partitionwizard.com/partition-wizard-bootable-cd.html

Burn the iso file with Nero or Imgburn and boot the CD. Select your External Drive and delete any partitions that are shown. Then create a new partition and format to NTFS.

You may be able to get some data off with Data Recovery Wizard or Power Data Recovery.