0

I was trying today to debug a computer problem my grandmother had with her Laptop and external hard drive. She runs Windows 10 and has an external 1TB Western Digital hard drive for Backups. Here is what happened:

When the drive was connected it was recognized and displayed in the Device Manager. It also shows in disk manager and can be seen using the diskpart command`s list option. Diskpart also recognized the single partition on the drive, but not the volume. The drive did also not show up with the other drives in her Explorer.

I have tried the things I could come up with with the limited time I had: reinstalled the drivers for the hard drives, tried to manually add a drive letter, but the OS recognized the partition, but not the volume. I was able to use the drive just fine on my Linux Laptop, so I saved the data and tried completely reformatting with the Windows System. After that the drive was just fine. After unplugging and reconnecting however it was back to the start.

To make sure it was not just a faulty drive I tried to connect my own external drive that I had at hand and which had also worked fine thus far on all other platforms I have have used it on. The same strange behaviour occured, so I am suspecting a hardware/software issue with the Laptop rather than the original drive being defective.

I am not really a Windows guy anymore since switching to Linux and have no real clue about windows 10. I am hoping that maybe someone here has seen something similar and might now the answer or can point me in the right direction.

1
  • 1
    This sounds like a dying drive to me.
    – flolilo
    Nov 4, 2017 at 23:10

1 Answer 1

1

I was able to use the drive just fine on my Linux Laptop, so I saved the data and tried completely reformatting with the Windows System. After that the drive was just fine. After unplugging and reconnecting however it was back to the start.

This is good evidence that the drive is defective. There's a slight chance it's nothing more than a failing power supply which could easily be replaced, but that's the best case scenario.

Western Digital offers their free Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows which is designed to test both internal and external WD drives. You can try to run a test on the drive to see if any errors are reported.

In my experience, strange behavior from hard drives is it's own best evidence of failure...even if diagnostic software claims otherwise. I've seen plenty of cases where intermittent failure conditions fool diagnostic software into reporting "All Clear" when in fact the drive wound up in the recycle bin.

3
  • Seeing that the drive works fine and it also affects another external drive I have tested, I would normally exclude a failing drive as an issue. Could it be a hardware issue in the laptop causing all of the USB ports to give too little power? Nov 5, 2017 at 8:07
  • You've added information in this comment that belongs in your question. Please edit your question and then ping me (@Twisty) so I can update my answer to address this. Nov 7, 2017 at 3:57
  • Thanks for the reminder you are right. I have added the info to the original question. @Twisty Nov 7, 2017 at 9:32

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .