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Brent JohnsonFlag for United States of America

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WD 2 TB external drive recognized, but not showing up as a drive?

Hello Experts,

I received the Western Digital 2TB external hard drive in the mail recently and when I plugged it in for the first time everything was fine and I was able to backup a lot of my documents onto it.  Now, I did drop it by accident, but it wasn't that high up and I don't hear any rattling or anything and all the lights are still turning on and everything is still functioning on the physical device, but when I go to plug it into the computer it does not show up under "drives" in "mycomputer".  When I right click on mycomputer and go to manage, I can see the drive listed in Windows 7, but not in XP.  When I try to click on it to format it, it gives me some kind of "I/O" error so it's pretty much useless right now.  Does anyone know what could have happened or does anyone have a solution for me?  Could that small drop have broken the whole thing?  Thanks for any assistance.
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Gary Davis
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Well, if you are getting an I/O error, that does not sound good. I'd go to the WD site and download their diagnostic software and run it on the drive to let it find out the problem. I had an issue with a notebook drive from a friend and did the saem and it actually showed that it has suffered "shock damage".

Gary Davis
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is there any audible clicks, buzzes, scraping sounds or beep noises from teh drive?
it sounds like the drop has damaged the heads (more likely if the drive was on and spinning at the time of the drop)
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reecem27, one thing I did notice, although I'm not sure if it did this or not when I first got it, is that when I power it on, it does these short, quiet "vroom" bursts.  It will go, "vroom (subside), vroom (subside), vroom (subside)". Then it goes away  This "vroom" sound is very quiet, but you can hear it if you listen closely.  This only happens when you turn the drive on from being off.
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Reece
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it goes without saying that you do NOT mention that it has been dropped/bumped or used in a location it is likely to be moved whilst in use.
Hard drives are succeptible to heat and physical shock, so it is not surprising that the drive appears to be malfunctioning.  You can try running GetDataBack (www.runtime.org) in Win7 to try to retrieve your data (it's free to detect, but costs to save).
Thank you I will RMA this.