20 Most Recent Western Digital 500GB MyBook Office Edition 500 GB USB 2.0 Hard Drive Questions & Answers

Without taking it apart it would be difficult to diagnose. I would venture to guess that one small component broke internally. You may be forced to purchase an external HDD enclosure, and move your drive.

Download testdisk and run it to see if it recognised in the list. If so use the intel option to find a boot sector

The drive itself is probably safe. The power circuit board inside is usually toast when this happens. But given the low replacement cost of these external drives, it's probably not worth trying to get it repaired. I don't know if anyone besides the manufacturer would even try to service this. The cost of parts (if they can be obtained at all) and labor might approach that of a new drive. WD may offer a flat-rate repair service (likely they would just put your drive into a new housing), but I've never checked. Their website should list service options.

Your best course might be to remove the drive and check it by hooking it up in your computer. If it survived, order an external drive case from any of many online sources and put the drive into it. Otherwise you haven't wasted any more money on a repair.

Western Digital hard drive inside is fried, check their website for information, they replace it for free if the drive itself is still in warranty, it might be gave it a shot.

You may be able to remove the hard drive manually and try another USB adapter to access it on your computer.

Might be pootched though.

Rule of thumb is to never save your files to only 1 source. Its not a question of if a hard drive is going to fail but WHEN.

change your drive to a new case and try again,
if result is the same,then replace to drive

You should not even try to install an operating system on an external drive. Windows looks at the "C" drive and installs programs to "C" drive. You are trying to put it on the "G" drive. You will have too many problems and wish you never had tried. Buy a larger main drive and partition it with two equal partitions. Then "Dual Boot". You will find how to do this on the internet. Just Google "Dual Booting".

Get TESTDISK and see if it is recognised, if so TestDisk has some tools that may help

If your HARD DRIVE was exposed to a magnetic field, this can happen.
Try a scandisck run.
Boot up in safe mode and run fix disk.

The hard disk is having bad sectors on its first 3000 sectors.the bad sectors are caused by degradation of the platter of the hard disk.OR the factory area of the hard disk has certain files called SMART, G -LIST and other log files.Unless one empties those log files with a good tool , one cant format ones hard disk.

This is likely a couple problems; 1. The hard drive is dying or is dead. You're looking at hardware recovery if this is the case. There are some tools such as Spinrite that might be able to recover the disk. (GRCHard drive data recovery software) 2. The power supply on the computer/laptop is not functioning as well as it used to. Try using another PC to see if there's any difference in results.

Download testdisk and run it to see if it recognised in the list. If so use the intel option to find a boot sector

Remove the drive from the external case it is in and connect directly to your computer - see if the bios recognizes it. If so, the OS will do so also and you can access it. Also means the electronics of the external case are no good. If not recognized in other machine, the hard drive has gone to hard drive heaven and needs to be replaced.