No longer recognizing external hard drive

Spencicle · Spencicle #1 (**permalink**)

07-15-2010, 01:56 AM

My iMac has stopped recognizing my Western Digital external hard drive. I did not put anything on the drive right before it stopped showing up. It connects using USB along with it's own power supply. I have tried all of my USB ports and none of them recognized the hard drive.

I opened Disk Utility and it shows up. It has two items relating to the external hard drive. The first says 232.9GB WDJB External Media and the second indented below it says disk3s1. Both items have the Verify Disk and Repair Disk options grayed out (along with the Verify Disk Permissions and Repair Disk Permissioners). It was already formatted with FAT 32. I don't have access to a Windows machine or another Mac machine to see if it is just the hard drive.

chscag · chscag #2 (**permalink**)

07-15-2010, 02:15 AM

Will Disk Utility allow it to be erased and formatted? Don't actually do it, just see if it can be. If DU won't erase and format it, the drive probably has failed.

If you have valuable data on the drive that you need, it may be possible to extract it with special software. Data Rescue 3 is very good at that and can be downloaded as a trial version to test with before buying.

Regards.

Spencicle · Spencicle #3 (**permalink**)

07-15-2010, 02:33 AM

Both Erase and Reformat are available.

chscag #2 (permalink)
Member Since: Jan 23, 2008 Location: Fort Worth, Texas Posts: 32,043 Mac Specs: 21.5" iMac 2.5 GHz i5, iPad 3rd Gen., 3 iPods	07-15-2010, 02:15 AM Will Disk Utility allow it to be erased and formatted? Don't actually do it, just see if it can be. If DU won't erase and format it, the drive probably has failed. If you have valuable data on the drive that you need, it may be possible to extract it with special software. Data Rescue 3 is very good at that and can be downloaded as a trial version to test with before buying. Regards. Community Guidelines
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Spencicle #1 (permalink)
Member Since: Jul 15, 2010 Posts: 2	07-15-2010, 01:56 AM My iMac has stopped recognizing my Western Digital external hard drive. I did not put anything on the drive right before it stopped showing up. It connects using USB along with it's own power supply. I have tried all of my USB ports and none of them recognized the hard drive. I opened Disk Utility and it shows up. It has two items relating to the external hard drive. The first says 232.9GB WDJB External Media and the second indented below it says disk3s1. Both items have the Verify Disk and Repair Disk options grayed out (along with the Verify Disk Permissions and Repair Disk Permissioners). It was already formatted with FAT 32. I don't have access to a Windows machine or another Mac machine to see if it is just the hard drive.
	QUOTE Thanks

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