External Hard Drive Broken (?)- need help fixing or recovery

ivadad

Commendable
Jul 29, 2016
3
0
1,510
I was using my external WD My Book hard drive to copy files from an old computer with XP. It somehow malfunctioned (maybe I unplugged it at a wrong time although it wasn't seemingly being used at the moment) and the computer stopped recognizing it when I tried to plug it back in.

Now when I try to plug it into my regular computer it shows up as two drives: 1) a "WD Unlocker" drive which Ive never seen before & 2) an unrecognized drive that tells me I need to format it. In Disk Management this drive shows up diving into three parts one "healthy" and 2 " unallocated." Chkdsk doesnt work.

My questions are :
1) What happened?
2) Can I return the hard drive to its old working format ( I read somewhere that this could be malfunctioning wire)?
3) If not and the hard drive is broken can I recover the files using any particular program?