Greetings all. Last night one of my WD MyBook usb hard drives failed. I lost 350gb worth of stuff, including some of my old music I'd recorded that I hadn't backed up in a while.
I feel like a gigantic moron for not backing up, and I should.
I turn the drive on and I get 3 clicks, then another 3 clicks. Windows recognizes that a usb drive has been inserted, and the safely remove hardware message comes up, but the drive doesn't get assigned a letter. I can go into the device manager and it's listed there under disk drives, but it's not in My Computer.
I did some research, and this seems to be a fairly common theme with WD drives. Noted for the future.
I found a website that has a walkthru on how to open the casing up and remove the drive. Supposedly it's worked for some people to then hook it up internally to a comp. I can try that, but I've also read about freezing a hard drive, and sometimes that enables it to work again long enough to get some data off of it.
Should I try to remove the drive from the casing first, and see if it works that way? I'm leery of trying to freeze it and then condensation getting in the drive and ruining it completely. On the other hand, the process of removing the casing sounds involved, and freezing it would be quite easier.
A data recovery service is out of the question. I don't have the thousands of dollars it would cost.
Any suggestions?