Unable to access External USB Hard drive

**Miami Steve** · 23-04-2013, 01:53 PM

Separated this out from the previous External Hard Drive thread.

I have a WD MyBook Essential (2TB) HDD, with a USB3 connection. Drive was last used about a year ago when I created backup images of 3 laptops (using EaseUs ToDo Backup Free). A couple of nights ago I had a need to restore some music files which had been deleted. (Fortunately I can reload from the original CD if required). The drive has been sitting on a shelf for the last year or so. When I fired it up and plugged it in, Windows identified a new device attached and set it up. The drive does NOT show in My Computer. I opened Computer Management and the drive was listed, but had 0% used and was listed as "uninitialised".

I downloaded the latest version of WD SmartWare and fired it up. The drive showed, but with a padlock icon below it. Clicking the drive in SmartWare opened a window indicating the wrong password had been entered more than 5 times and the drive was locked. I followed the instructions to reset everything, but it will still not give the "Enter password" dialog. Not that I had set a password anyway.

Having decided that the drive had probably got corrupted, when the wrong password dialog was next displayed, i clicked the 'Erase" confirmation checkbox and clicked the Erase buton. I immediately get a "Write Error" message.

At this stage I decided to try initialising the drive through the computer management console. Right click the drive and select initialise results in an 'i/o error' message.

Is the drive dead? Is it the controller (mentioned in the other thread), which handles encryption?

Assuming the worst, what would be the recommendation for a (reliable) 3TB external drive. Also, is the EaseUs ToDo backup free the best option?

Thanks in advance.

OS is Windows 7 Ultimate on a Vaio F137 laptop.