Western Digitial My Book: Can't access the data on the drive

Question

My girlfriend has this external hard drive by Western Digital called a My Book.

When the external drive is connected, it does not show it as an accessible disk drive on the computer. However, it shows up fine in Device Manager:

I can also see it in Disk Management, but the volume is not mapped to a drive letter, nor can I change the drive letter:

It only gives me access to Delete Volume:

I would rather not lose the data on the drive if possible. What can I do from here to get to the data?

Things I've tried/know:

• Uninstall drivers and re-install them
• Device does the same thing when attach to either her Win7 laptop or my Win8 laptop
• I don't think there's an issue with the HDD itself. No clicking noises, etc. I ran Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diangostics (DLGDIAG) and the SMART Status was a "PASS", all of the SMART Disk Information looked fine. I haven't had the time to run the diag tests yet but I do not believe it's a mechanical issue.

The hard drive is inside of an enclosure, I have not attempted to pry the drive out yet.

How can I get Windows to properly detect this drive?

Solution

Looking at the last screenshot, you see the drive having 2 partitions: 1) UEFI, 2) Primary. Plus some empty space. No file system is shown for that primary partition -- while for the other disk they are clearly displayed. This leaves two possibilities:

1. the partition is unformatted
2. the file system used is unknown to Windows

As you speak of data you don't want to lose, I rather assume the latter. Could it be the drive was formatted using a different OS, say e.g. Linux or a Mac?

My recommendation would be: Download yourself a Linux LiveCD, burn it, and boot from it (or use another Linux system if you already have one available), and then connect the drive to that computer. Linux knows a lot more file systems than Windows supports, and its auto-detection works pretty well. Chances are good it will recognize and mount the partition in question.

If that worked out, open a command line and issue the mount command. This should list up all mounted partitions and, amongst other information, also the filesystem used. This way you can find out what it really is.

Also, if it worked out, you can copy all data to another drive, and re-format the partition using a file system supported by Windows -- if that drive should be used there.

EDIT: You also might want to take a look at one of the "related" questions: My Western Digital 500GB Passport disk says “not formatted” when I plug it in Windows. Two of the answers might prove helpful: one mentions TestDisk which I can recommend as well, and the other a LiveCD with a lot of recovering and testing tools (Hiren's Boot CD).

Comments

[Ilya Kurnosov]

TestDisk was able to find the lost partition and re-write it, making the disk accessible :D