External hard drive problem

Rjtuazon1998 · January 31, 2016

I have a problem with my western digital external hard drive (1 tb my passport) Its not functioning properly as seen below. Everything lights up well, but when i plug it, thats what happens. It doesnt even wanna show the right name with should be (My Passport). These are what i tried and its results

I tried to:

Format it: Unable to format

Open it: Either that folder freezes causing my pc to freeze/ It says insert disk

Open disk management: Its stuck at "Connecting to virtual disk" ONLY when that hard drive is plugged

Open its properties for chkdsk: It doesnt want to open and it also freezes

Format the hard drive using cmd: Unable to format also

Uninstall the driver in device manager: It never finishes, i tried leaving it to uninstall for about 5 hrs straight, yeah its still there, my guess is that it froze there.

YES I HAVE TRIED ALL THESE ON ANOTHER PC, SAME RESULT

Is there anything i can do? I dont mind wiping all the data, or losing all of it. As long as it can become usable again.

gabe927 · January 31, 2016

Have you tried plugging it into a computer with a different os like linux or osx and formatting it from there?

Rjtuazon1998 · January 31, 2016

No sadly i dont have access to a computer with a different os

zMeul · January 31, 2016

19 minutes ago, Rjtuazon1998 said:

No sadly i dont have access to a computer with a different os

you could use a live Linux distro on a USB stick

Belgarionbg · January 31, 2016

Did you check the smart status? Because I have seen number of external disks begin their journey to the bin with this type of behaviour. You can use http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html as its probably the most versatile soft for getting smart status from external disks.

Aside of sometimes just a cable gone bad or bad USB port. :)