extrenal hard drive wont let me access it...?

[joko]

its a western digital 1.5 TB

it was fine at first but last few times of use, after trying to eject it, it has said i cant because its in use - but it wasnt, so ive had no choice but to shut down the machine, or just pull the usb out...it seemed not to have caused any problems at first.

i dont use it that often its just for back up - however now it wont let me access it at all.

if i turn the computer on while its plugged in the pc wont get past the first start up page...

the computer recognises a hard drive, but no longer shows its capacity or unused space, it just has a hard drive icon.
on clicking on that, the cursor just spins and spins and does nothing.
i tried to right click to view properties but it wouldnt show properties either.

any ideas what i can do?

is there any software that i can download that will let me get into it?

thanks

[ChuckFickens]

Try it in a different computer before doing anything else.

[joko]

thanks chuck, it had the same response in my xp mini comp as my win7 laptop

i am just running chkdsk on it so will see if that works
ive downloaded testdisk, but havent tried it yet

do you know of any other things to try?

[Old_Geezer]

I've had drives go down on me before now. Could be a faulty drive, or maybe the interface.

One thing you coud try is to put it into a different external enclosure in order to rule out the interface. Or even open up the existing one and check connections. One other thought, there are no switches on the back accidently knocked are there ? Such as an on/off switch ? Ot what about the drive's power source, checked that ?

[Old_Geezer]

If you can't access it how will software such as chkdsk find it to run ?

What does computer management / disk management show ?

[deggers316]

dont unplug any external drive with out going through the eject procedure you could loose all on it if it says its in use it will be somewhere just leave and try a few hours later it will sort itself out mine does

[joko]

thanks all
og - the power is ok ... the computer recognises there is a h drive attached, just wont let me open it.

the chkdsk hasnt fixed it and the software i tried, just checks the computer - it doesnt give me an option to choose the drive unfortunately.
there are no buttons on it at all - just a blinking LED

disk management is saying its 'healthy' ...!

how can i open it then? there are no screws or anything...

[snags]

''i dont use it that often its just for back up''

If you have the contents of the drive elsewhere you could try reformatting it (which will erase everything currently on it).

[joko]

sadly snags there are somethings on it that i dont have back up for otherwise i would. it does keep asking me to format.
i checke w
now with disk management and it said its working fine... but was empty, and wasnt listed as NFTS ... i tried to back it up and it started to... but then i realised the drive i was backing up to may be able to recover some of the lost stuff so i cancelled, did a recuva which found lots of stuff - but not all. i have tried to redo the backup but it wont let me now ... it also now freezes the disk management box and then doesnt show up ... but when it does it had changec to a RAW drive....
any ideas what i can do?
i am quite computer savvy so happy to give anything a go.

reformatting would prevent me then being able to then use the recuva software to retrieve deleted files wouldnt it..? is there a more intense type of software that can recover even after a reformat?

[joko]

it was actually set to allow instant removal.. so not sure if removing it could have caused the problem now...