theproffessor

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My friend's WD external recently died and we are trying to see if we can resurrect it. He had it connected to a mac and it started doing this thing where it would spin up, but not turn on and was no longer recognized at all by his mac. We opened it up took out the drive and I put it in my desktop PC. It is currently being recognized in my bios and disk management in win7, but does not come up in my computer/ I can't access the files. It also says in disk management that the drive has 100% free space. I'm guessing all this means it dead, but I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions?
 

elel

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I don't know what operating system you are using, but in XP go to start->settings->control panel->performance & maintenance->administrative tools->computer management->storage->disk management (local). Once you are there, you will be able to see the drive if it is at all detected. If you want to you you can format it from here, but this is a conclusive test to see if windows can see the drive.
 
I seen some posts suggest that putting the drive in the freezer overnight is a way to temporarily resurrect a drive for the purposes of getting data off it. If you do this then be ready to grab as much data as you can as fast as you can because if it works there's no guarantee how long it will keep working as the drive warms back up again.
 

theproffessor

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The freezer eh? Well, I guess I'll give that a try later tonight... I'll post the results later...

@elel: I have checked disk management. The drive is recognized in disk management, but all I can do is delete, I can't look at any of the data.
 

elel

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Well, if you can see it in disk management, I don't think that the freezer will do anything for it. From what I understand, the freezer changes the position of the components enough to give the drive a servo lock, and it won't show up at all if it does not obtain this, just sit there and click. I'm guessing that windows says that it has an unknown partition on it, right? I have never dealt directly with a mac before, but I would guess that windows cannot read the data not because the data is bad but because it does not know how. There is probably a utility to allow windows to 'see' the drive, but I don't know what it is ATM.