External Hard Drive/Device Manager Problem

[Holmes]

Hello,

 

I bought a WD 250 GB SATA HD at around the first of the year, I decided to get a case for the hard drive and put the two together to make an external (USB 2.0 SATA and IDE). I wanted to use it for backup. First few months everything worked fine and there were no problems.

 

Then one day this spring(early April I think) I go to access the drive and nothing is showing up and I get a nice bubble from device manager saying that that the USB device is not recognized by windows and the device may have malfunctioned. When I go into device manager and go to USB it says "unknown device", I never installed any drivers for the HD/case combo and as far as I know none came with them (I don't have the packaging etc readily available).

 

I have tried connecting the HD combo to other computers to no avail, I'm almost positive the HD is still good and I have checked all connections and they seem to be fine. So if you have any idea how to solve this problem it'd be appreciated. Thanks.

 

 

-Holmes

[TheFiresInTheSky]

the only thing ive heard of is someone pulling out the usb cable from the computer without "safely removing" it.

in this case, the drive would be corrupt.

i took mine back to best buy and they gave me a new one.

[hapy days]

Holmes, I had the same problem and was told that I installed a program with my external on. What I was told and done was to use a recovery program and recover my files as my external was full of music, pictures and films. I had to buy another external as I had not enough room on my computor for the amount of info on the external, then reformat the external and replace it all again.

 

If you do not have a lot on the external and your pc has enough room to store it all, recover it to pc. If not enough room on pc then recover to another external, pc, laptop etc.

 

DO NOT reformat until you recover your your stuff.

 

hope this helps.

 

let me know how you get on.