WD Hard Drive not showing up in My Computer

Hey,
My Western Digital 320GB external hard drive is not showing up on my computer. The blue light on the hard drive lights up when I plug it into the computer. I tried removing all the old USB mass storage drivers and after I did that it started showing up under disk management as:
Disk 1
Unknown
Not Initialized
so I tried to initialize it (I tried both MBR and GPT) and I got:
Incorrect Function
I have a Dell Inspiron 1440 laptop with Windows 7, it's only about a year and a half old. The hard drive was my sister's and it's a few years old. Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Grace

 

You can try to partition and format with GParted Live CD. Just make sure you are formatting the external drive and not your internal system drive. You will have to burn the iso with something like ImgBurn. You probably want to delete any partitions that exist on the hard drive and then repartition as a primary partition and format NTFS. This will destroy any data on your hard drive. Do you want to retrieve the data on your external hard drive?

GParted partitioning software - Full tutorial

Pay special attention to Identifying the right device.

 

if windows native disk management feature couldn't help, ok, trying third party tool is the better choice to do it. and the data in the hdd may not be saved. format it,even wipe the hdd, then create new partitions on it
this disk management tool is a good choice

 

Have you tested the drive on another PC? If the problem repeats it could possibly be an issue with the drive or enclosure.

Another tip (not sure why this works, but it has for me in the past): Unplug the USB and reboot the PC. Once the Windows desktop has finished loading, plug the USB cord back in and try again.

Good luck. Hope this helps.

 

I would like to retrieve the stuff on my hard drive if possible. I have tried the drive on other computers and it hasn't worked there either. I also tried unplugging and restarting. Is there any way to fix it without wiping all the info? If not I'll try partitioning and formatting.

 

You can try Minitools Power Data Recovery - free for home use. It does a pretty good job of recovering files from corrupted disks. Just make sure you do not copy the recovered files back to the external hard drive.

Recover damaged partition

 

If tgell's suggestions don't work, a final option is to carefully disassemble the external HDD case - inside it's just a regular 2.5" or 3.5" SATA hard drive.

If you're comfortable doing it you can connect the drive directly to an open SATA port on the motherboard inside a desktop PC. If not, you can buy a new drive enclosure and install the HDD in it.

If the problem is the controller in the old external drive case this should work. If the drive itself has tanked, buy the replacement enclosure from a store with a decent return policy if it fails to make the drive readable.

 

This is exactly what I did, because I'm having a similar problem with my WD hard drive, and even installed internally my computer won't properly detect it...

 

If tgell's tips don't work you'll unfortunately have to decide how valuable the data on the drive is. The only option left will be a professional data recovery service that disasembles the drive in a dust free room and attempts to recover the data off the drive platters. Depending on the size of the drive and amount of data this can be several hundred dollars.

Sorry for the bad news...please don't shoot the messenger. :guns