External Harddrive in Device Manager but no where else

[Bollard]

Hey!

Long story short, my Western Digital Premium ES 500GB External drive was about to die. I was getting Delayed Write failure errors, so i ran chkdsk. That came back with errors.

So, i pulled all the data off the drive, and reformatted. About 80% through the reformat the PC froze... So i restarted explorer.exe, getting rid of the freeze, but the Windows reformatting progress window didn't reappear. So, i left it overnight (thinking that was plenty enough time to do the last ~20%).

Now i can only see the drive in Device Manager (correctly identified and appears to be working fine). But, i cant see it in Explorer or Computer Management. I took out the USB cable and then reconnected it and got the "installing device" popup in the task bar, completing successfully but changing nothing.

Any ideas how i can access the drive to format / chkdsk it again? Acronis Disk Director doesn't see it. I put in a Vista install DVD (im on XP), and the installation wizard found the drive (but showed it as having 0.00MB). Western Digital Diagnostics also reports an error with the drive.

Where do i go from here?

[+Gary7 Subscriber²]

If you have the WD CD you can try to wipe the drive and then try to reinstall it and format it from the WD CD.

[Bollard]

Thanks for the reply.

WD CD? Ive installed the Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics, and it shows the drive as an unlabelled USB device with 0MB capacity. If i try to run any tests with it i get a "Cable test:: Read diagnostics sector error"

Any link to this WD CD?

[+Gary7 Subscriber²]

Thanks for the reply.

WD CD? Ive installed the Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics, and it shows the drive as an unlabelled USB device with 0MB capacity. If i try to run any tests with it i get a "Cable test:: Read diagnostics sector error"

Any link to this WD CD?

You should go to the install portion on that CD. There it should allow you to install it and format the drive.

[capr]

try using a linux live CD... i have found that linux will for some reason see and bypass a lot of things that windows doesn't. Use it all the time when recovering hds that windows thinks need to be formatted.

[Echilon]

The fact that Acronis doesn't see it sounds bad. Are you sure it's been assigned a drive letter? Check in start->run->compmgmt.msc. You should be able to see a partition, which may just need to be assigned a drive letter before it shows up in my computer.

[Richard Hammond]

You probably corrupted the disc when it froze formatting, you just need to go to start, run, diskmgmt.msc and look for the drive, right click on it and delete the partition thats already there, then right click and click create partition.

[Bollard]

Thanks for the responses.

+Gary7 - I really cant find any reference to a boot CD... just in Windows diagnostics.

rashidkaviani - I ran Ubuntu 8 and GParted didnt see anything.

+Echilon / Richard Hammond - The drive is not visible at all in Disk Management.

Cant believe that the 1 year warranty ran out on the 28th August... just when i started having problems. Should have RMA'd it straight away instead of trying to fix it myself.

Any more ideas...? Its getting a bit desperate...

[+Gary7 Subscriber²]

Thanks for the responses.

+Gary7 - I really cant find any reference to a boot CD... just in Windows diagnostics.

rashidkaviani - I ran Ubuntu 8 and GParted didnt see anything.

+Echilon / Richard Hammond - The drive is not visible at all in Disk Management.

Cant believe that the 1 year warranty ran out on the 28th August... just when i started having problems. Should have RMA'd it straight away instead of trying to fix it myself.

Any more ideas...? Its getting a bit desperate...

On the Western Digital CD that you have there should be a section that will install the disk. You have to boot off of it. Change the boot selection in your bios to boot off of a Optical Drive. Then go into the installation part on the CD. and install it. It will allow you to wipe it, format it, partition it. If you can't accomplish this, go out and buy a new drive. I have had great luck with Seagate. There also is a program called SPINRITE that may help.