WD MyBook 160mb ext. HD not working

My USB external hard drive has a problem. I am using Windows XP in a Dell laptop, with a WD My Book 160mb external hard drive.

I can no longer get to the data, it shows in my computer but will not retrieve anything.

Any ideas? I sure would like to get my data off.

noel1cent

 

So when you go to Windows Explorer ... you can see # Drive ... but when you double click on it you can't see any files??? Do you get any error messages?

 

That is right, I can see the drive but hen you click on it, the computer hangs up and you never see any files. I have let it go for about an hour and then just restart the computer.

I tried going to device manager and uninstall the drive and on restart it does a reinstall but still the same issue.

 

That's weird ... usually it would says something like This drive is corrupt and needs to be formatted. Would you like to format it now?

Try going to CMD and typing chkdsk /r #:

(where # is the drive letter)

 

This does not work. I have tried multiple times and on different computers. You can see the drive listed on my computer BUT when try to do a check disk it is not seen. Message says there is no drive on that letter.

 

Tried advice from "TOKE" on thread = "external hard drive in mid-process not recognized" by Damamo

Advice = "goto cntrl panl, Admin, Computer Mgmnt, Storage, Disk Mgmnt, Right click on white area after drive and explore ... "

This did not work BUT I got an error message "E:\ is not accessible The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error"

Hoping this error will lead to a solution. I want to move/recover the data stored on this drive.