WD My Book Essential Drive Failure - Help please....

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shelbyman

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Jan 5, 2015
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Guys...I've owned a WD My Book Essential for a couple years and when I plugged it in to my laptop tonight, the drive was not visible and I could not get to my data. Also, the external hard drive was making a low scratching noise.

Should I try software to recover my data, do you recommend I take the drive to a PC store for recovery or are there other options.

I've read through this thread and I'm not certain what the best, easiest course of action is to save my data??
 
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Darkbreeze
It the drive is not detected at all, and since you have a laptop rather than a desktop and cannot remove the drive from the casing to connect it via SATA cable to the computer, (unless you have a SATA to USB drive adapter, to try and test it that way to determine if it's the enclosure that's bad or the drive) your only alternative if it's mission critical or irreplaceable data, is to take it to a data recovery professional and allow them to retrieve the data.

Don't go to just any yahoo jonny come lately repair shop either if you value your data and it's that important to recover. Find a data recovery specialist. It won't likely be cheap, but it's the best method if the drive has failed. This is exactly why it's so important to have all...
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Darkbreeze

Darkbreeze

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Jun 24, 2014
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It the drive is not detected at all, and since you have a laptop rather than a desktop and cannot remove the drive from the casing to connect it via SATA cable to the computer, (unless you have a SATA to USB drive adapter, to try and test it that way to determine if it's the enclosure that's bad or the drive) your only alternative if it's mission critical or irreplaceable data, is to take it to a data recovery professional and allow them to retrieve the data.

Don't go to just any yahoo jonny come lately repair shop either if you value your data and it's that important to recover. Find a data recovery specialist. It won't likely be cheap, but it's the best method if the drive has failed. This is exactly why it's so important to have all data stored on drives to be backed up to secondary locations. It's much cheaper to buy a second 100 dollar drive than it is to lose years of information or pay hundreds of dollars to recover it, if it's recoverable. Hopefully it is.

If you have any tech friends you can at least remove the drive from the enclosure and try connecting it to their computer to try and determine if it's the drive or the enclosure. And actually, a professional will likely try that first as well so you might get lucky in that regard if it's not the drive.
 
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