Why won't my external hard drive connect?
I’ve got a WD Smartware hard drive and all my iTunes music/movies/etc is on it . . . I’ve had it since December, and it’s worked perfectly, until now. I’ll plug it in, and it’ll light up, but the hard drive won’t show up on my computer.
I’d love to know how to fix it. . . or even whether or not it’s fixable. Or if there’s at least a way to get all my data off of it. ‘Cause that’s where everything is.
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6 Answers
The first thing to try is a different cable. If that doesn’t work, you may have a failed hard drive. If you do, I’m sure you have a backup – you will have to purchase a new external drive and restore the backup. If you have no backup, I’m willing to bet you will from now on.
Have you rebooted your computer and then tried it? That always solves it for me when one of my external drives randomly disappears from the list.
Aside from what @dpworkin said, you could also have a failed USB port on the computer. I’ve got one on this old machine that is “flaky”. The drive works fine, but sometimes it just isn’t ‘seen’. When I plug it in via the USB ports on the docking station, it works without fail.
WD external drives are notorious for these breakdowns, unfortunately. I would try everything suggested above, and if worse comes to worse, get a computer geek pal to open the enclosure and test the bare drive itself by installing it into a desktop and seeing if it’s detected. It could be the connections inside the enclosure not “taking”.
Have you tried to connecting it to another computer? That would rule out a computer problem “seeing” a perfectly good drive.
Sorry for your trouble. I hope you find a painless solution.
Maybe it’s a driver problem. Drivers are what allows things like external hard drives to connect to computers. Try restarting your computer. If that doesn’t work try doing a system restore.
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