Toby

I am not sure this is the best place to post but here goes. I just had a WD 4T portable HD fail. I had it along with some others plugged in and accidently unpluged it without requesting it to be ejected thru the computer. I don't know if that did it or it was just it's time. I tried it in a different computer but it does not recognize it either. It is getting power and I can feel the disk spinning.It is a backup HD so it is not a big deal but if there is a simple procedure I can go thru on the computer I'd like to try it.
I have read multiple times how others have had problems and how they fixed them but I pretty much ignored them since I have never had this happen before.

Rather than doing a search of several hundred old posts I would like to speed things up by asking for responses only from those of you who have been thru this. No need to post you should have known better or I always do etc. Please save your energy and answer only if you have a solution or suggestion for this problem. I am using windows on a HP
Thanks in advance

Ourspolair

https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/21239/h/p2

Good luck!

JD750 Loc: SoCal

It probably scrambled the directory data when you unplugged it. You might end up having to reformat it. But you have nothing to lose in trying to fix it. Do you have a “disk repair” utility? Run it. If it fails run it a few more times. Sometimes they will work after a couple tries.

FYI my girlfriend Accidentally turned off power to her computer before it was completely shut down. The sucker wouldn’t even boot from the hard drive. After booting into the bios, I was able to get some recovery software from Dell over the internet. Alas tried many things over the course of a week. The data on the HD was trashed. But there was nothing wrong with the hard drive itself. So after reformatting and reloading the OS it was like a brand new computer.

alawry Loc: Timaru New Zealand

I had a similar event with a 1tb drive a few years ago, and googled the issue, came up with a dos command which reindexed the drive. It worked. But took about 3days. Still using it now but take more care. I think the command was chkdsk something. Good luck.

AirWalter Loc: Tipp City, Ohio

Don't forget that if you format the drive you will loose all the files that are on it. Good luck.

applepie1951 Loc: Los Angeles,California

This topic has been here before regarding the same company drives (Western Digital) and I voiced my experience with WD then, I pray that some listened. As I said before I had the exact same thing happen to me, and I lost over 3,000.00 photos that I did not have a backup of, and after weeks of trying everything and even calling data recovery company only to be told that to recover what was on the drive would cost me thousands of dollars, I just faced the fact that I had lost those pictures, but what I did learn from that experience was even after you eject the disk make sure the light on the drive goes off indicating it has stop spinning before you unplug it, are to just shut down the computer before you unplug it and most importantly as far as I’m concerned, never buy are use WD drives, since my experience which was about 4 years ago I have never used WD external drives again, I now use LaCie and SanDisk SSD, all the problems I ever hear of drives failing has been with WD drives and in the last 4 years I have heard of a LOT, even friends of mine that owned them have had problems with them, you can try every data recovery software that’s out there but I doubt if any of them will work for your problem, so unless you’re willing to spend a lot of money to pay a data recovery company sorry to say you’re out of luck, my advice once you get over the hurt, never use WD drives again, I would not use a WD drive again even if someone gave it to me for free......Good Luck

Picture Taker Loc: Michigan Thumb

Contact the Hard Drive manufacture

EdJ0307 Loc: out west someplace

I have several USB external portable hard drives, one external non-portable hard drive and a bunch of flash/thumb drives. If I have any of those drives plugged into the computer and right click on the drive in This PC there is any option to "eject" the flash drives but there is not an "eject" option for the hard drives. So I figure you can just unplug it without any problems. But I usually don't remove it until I shut the computer down.

Picture Taker Loc: Michigan Thumb

When you resolve this, remember to get some extra hard drives and have a continual and current back up for all you stuff. I learned years ago and now have 2 drive of everything.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Actually WD does make some very good drives, especially since they bought HGST, it just depends on the model. The fact is that over the years, WD and Seagate have bought up almost their competitors, so if you’ve heard of HD failure, the odds are at least 50%, it’s a WD or one of their owned companies. It all depends on where the drive was manufactured and the model. All the companies have manufacturing operations in multiple countries, and a specific plant may have a very good or a very bad reliability record, which can change dramatically over time and with the model being manufactured. For example, the LaCie, which you endorse (and is now owned by Seagate), has produced some of the worst and least reliable drives ever made, while WD’s enterprise class drives (such as the HGST UltraStar) are as good as any spinning disks made. That said, WD, like many others, does not specify which of their drive models they use in a given external, but you can bet it’s one of their cheapest drive. As I’ve stated many times, you cannot manufacture, QC, market and sell at a reasonable retail profit, a quality external drive for <$100, and investing in them is, in my opinion a waste of money and dangerous. if you want a quality external, buy an enterprise class drive (such as the HGST Ultrastar I mentioned earlier) a fan cooled case, and put the two together yourself.

Either way, the era of the spinning disk is slowly coming to an end. SSDs are at least as reliable, the speed is orders of magnitude higher, and the cost/TB is dropping by roughly half and the capacities doubling every year. I recently replaced an Intel SSD deployed in 2012 with. New larger NVME m.2 drive on an NVME to PCIe adapter, not because the intel had failed, but because it was full - I still keep it online. BTW, that new drive (a Samsung 970) benchmarks right at 3,000 MB/sec (!).

Now to the OP’s issue. It’s likely that the file system or allocation table/MBR is corrupted, but not certain. A write operation may have been interrupted, causing the corruption, or ot may have been a power glitch caused by unplugging the drive. If it’s FS corruption, the drive can probably be saved, but not necessarily the contents. If the OP has a drive repair and diagnostic ap, now is the time to run it. Question(s): is the drive visible in disk management (assuming this is a Windows machine)? If not, and it is USB connected, have you tried unplugging the USB cable and replugging it? When you do, does Windows recognize a new device and if so, does it then show up in disk manager? Btw, wouldn’t hurt to try a new USB cable and port just on principle - coincidences do happen. If you can see the drive, and are familiar with the command line, get to a command line, either from run>cmd or from powershell and execute a chkdsk command with the /r (repair) extension, and depending on the result, you may want to execute an MBR repair command. Report back to us your progress (or lack thereof) and one of the many experienced admins in the forum will try to help.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

I had a book-sized USB hard drive fail. Tried a bunch of things, but finally just took a knife and pried the case apart and extracted the disk assembly. It was the same sort of thing you find mounted in a computer so since I had a box that took disk drives I stuck it back in there and got it to work. The problem was the interface electronics, not the disk.

IMHO, the one advantage a spinning disk has over a SSD is that if the electronics fails you still have a chance to get the data off the drive. If a SSD fails, it's gone.

Of course, it might cost you to get the data off an old drive. The best prevention is a robust archival system using Duplication, Distribution, and Maintenance on your backup drives. And a cloud service as a backup backup.

Toby

Thanks to all that have responded. I have done must of the basic stuff such as try different computer, turn computer off and then back on etc. I feel the drive running and believe it is something inregards to software. Unfortunately due to a family problem that just occurred it has priority and I may not be able to try some of the very good ideas that have been posted. I will look into them before I take a hacksaw to it. Thanks very much to all of you for responding with good ideas. Hopefully in a week or so I may be able to respond with how things turned out. Have a great eeekend.

AndyBob Loc: St. Louis

The command is CHKDSK {disk letter} /F. For example, chkdsk g: /f.

It needs to be run from a command window. Click on the windows logo at the bottom left and type CMD and press <enter>.

Can take a while to run - have patience...

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

CHKDSK will only work if the system recognizes that the disk is connected. If there's an interface problem it won't show up on the list of disks.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

Rather than a hacksaw, I recommend finding the right tool to take the thing apart neatly. I had a dead drive that I couldn't get to work. I pried it out of the plastic case, but it was hardwired to the electronic interface. So I just found a very small star driver that fit the screws on the case and took out the screws. Once the screws were out it was clear that there were some hidden screws. I found the screws by peeling off the label and took those screws out. 8 screws total (4 showing). Once it was open I just put a USB cord on it and plugged it in. It made some noises but nothing moved. So I forced the disk to turn (it was pretty stiff). Eventually the disk started spinning and the heads started moving back and forth. It still didn't work, so I just gave up. Some day I'll take the disk out. It's a really nice piece of metal with a mirror finish. Maybe I'll find some use for it as a mirror. Looking at the insides, there are two platters for a 1TByte drive, so I have two mirrors to play with.

"Any worthwhile project is a valid excuse for a new tool"