Western Digitial My Book: Can't access the data on the drive
- by Bryan Denny
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?