Isolating external hard drive failure?

Question

I have a fairly new (~1.5 years old) external WD My Book with a bunch of audio projects that I'd like to recover. I'm wondering if there are any clever tricks I can try before pulling the disk out of the enclosure.

Symptom: Snow Leopard reports, when attempting to mount the drive, that it can't be read, would I like to initialize it? I choose ignore.

I've tried different USB ports, letting it sit for a while (in case it was somehow overheated), all to no avail. It's formatted HFS+.

It subsequently does not appear in Disk Utility as an unmounted volume but it does appear in the USB profiler:

My Book:

  Capacity: 731.13 GB (731, 133,470,208 bytes)
  Removable Media:  Yes
  Detachable Drive: Yes
  BSD Name: disk6
  Product ID:   0x1100
  Vendor ID:    0x1058  (Western Digital Technologies, Inc.)
  Version:   1.75
  Serial Number:    0BB9BB4D8FC25F7CB961605F89EB0C
  Speed:    Up to 480 Mb/sec
  Manufacturer: Western Digital 
  Location ID:  0xfd110000
  Current Available (mA):   500
  Current Required (mA):    2
  Partition Map Type:   Unknown
  S.M.A.R.T. status:    Not Supported

So, any recommended troubleshooting tips before I pull it apart and stick it into a tower?

Answer 1

Try to see if DiskWarrior recognizes it. Finder requesting to initialize means the drive is no longer recognized as HFS+ — which, as you seem to suggest you've been using the drive for a while now, would only come from corruption. When you say it doesn't appear in DiskUtility as an unmounted volume, is the root device in the drive tree?

It's possible connecting to a tower won't fix it, depending on what's broken [the drive, or the enclosure]. Is it possible you've formatted it accidentally? Was it disconnected without ejecting first?