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

Posted by Bryan Denny on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Bryan Denny
Published on 2012-12-15T21:16:25Z Indexed on 2012/12/15 23:07 UTC
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Filed under:

Windows

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hard-drive

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external-hard-drive

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western-digital

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mybook

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:

enter image description here

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:

enter image description here

It only gives me access to Delete Volume:

enter image description here

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?

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