External HD no longer works with computer

Did you say whether or not you have tried your external drive on another computer? If so, does it do the same thing on the other computers as it is now doing on yours, or does it work on other computers right now?

You said the whole computer is freezing when you plug it into the USB? I have worked with many internal HD's (I am a PC repair tech) and sometimes I will often plug the internal drive into a USB adapter so that I can attempt to backup data for people when we know the drives are failing. More often than not, when the hard drives are starting to have a mechanical failure, when they are plugged into the USB port they act exactly as you are describing. Exclamation points in device manager, or unrecognized usb device...computer freezing until the device is disconnected. Sometimes I have left a drive plugged in for hours and windows finally unfreezes and it attempts to mount the drive, but usually it doesn't matter much when they get that far off.

You say you have a WD hard drive? What model is it? Is it a true external drive or just some IDE internal drive that you have connected to a USB bay or adapter? Is the drive still under warranty? Did it get dropped or fall or anything when you had it connected to the 360 / PS3?

It could be that if it is having mechanical failures, the PS3 and 360 are somehow mounting it differently or in a way that it would only experience problems if it ran across a file sitting on a bad sector or something. Since the PS3 and 360 could not run a scandisk or repair or anything, maybe thats why the drive appears to mount, where windows may be trying to figure out whats wrong with it and fix the problem during mounting.

If your drive fails to load in ANY computer then I would consider a replacement. Hopefully it is still under warranty. If it will load on another computer, you may want to go ahead and start getting files backed up from it while its not too late.

Also, I do not think this applies to you based on what you have described, but I noticed a few other posts here and this may help them. For people that plug a USB drive in and it looks good in device manager but just doesn't have a drive letter, sometimes windows tries to give your external device the same drive letter as something else (like a CDROM or another internal drive). When that happens, the internal drive takes precedence. You have to tell windows to give your external device another drive letter. The easiest way to do this is to right click on MY COMPUTER and go to MANAGE. Then go to DISK MANAGEMENT. There you should see your USB drive listed. I can't remember off-hand if it will show the drive letter or not if its taken the same letter as another disk, but you can right click on the USB drive and tell it "CHANGE DRIVE LETTER AND PATHS" and it will give you the opportunity to change it to an unused drive letter. I like to set my USB drives pretty high, like W, X, T, or something... this particular issue occurs more often if you frequently unplug or move the USB drive around and also have other devices that may from time to time change their drive letter.

I hope this helps! I would post a link to my website / forum but I am not sure if that is even allowed, but my website is also a forum based around PC repair. If you would like the link to it I would be happy to provide it directly to you. I can answer things more quickly there usually. Let us know how it goes and good luck, but it sounds like a failing drive to me.

Thank you utaeladil.

I had exactly the problem described in your 2nd last pararaph, and was baffled, as usual.

I had an external hard drive which was assigned a drive number and when I added a partition on the internal drive, it took the drive letter of the external drive and so the external drive did not show in My Computer any more.

Following your clear instructions, the problem was fixed.

You may have saved me hours of fiddling around.

Thank you so much!

Hey utaeladil, I had the same problem with an external USB drive and just tried your solution of using "Change Drive Letter and Paths" in the disk management. Unfortunately it doesn't work. I can right click on my usual C drive and get that option, but when I right click on the USB drive the only option that pops up is the very un-helpful "Help".

The way the drives show up in disk management is bizarre. They show up as two separate volumes in the list above, but in the chart below they both show up side-by-side as "Disk 0". One with the drive letter C, and one with no drive letter at all. It will let me change the drive letter of C, but not of the other disk.

Any other ideas? I'm desperate. :)

I have had this problem in the past with a flash drive. I just had this problem with my WD external hard drive and I followed you directions to change the drive letter. It worked. Thank You very much. I would like a link to your website.

no - hold on- it's there but it won't let me change the drive as that's all greyed out.

The last few problems listed here (it shows up in device manager, but not in DISK MANAGEMENT and no-where else), I would try this...

First, try going to the DEVICE MANAGER (I'm sure you know how to get there, but for anyone who does not) by either RIGHT CLICKING on MY COMPUTER and going to MANAGE, then you have a DEVICE MANAGER section on the right, or you can RIGHT CLICK on MY COMPUTER, go to PROPERTIES, then go to the HARDWARE tab and hit the DEVICE MANAGER button.

Next, expand the sections for DISK DRIVES and also UNIVERSAL SERIAL BUS CONTROLLERS. Find anything pertaining to your external drive. (For instance, on my PC under DISK DRIVES I have "WD 10EACS External USB Device". Under my UNIVERSAL SERIAL BUS CONTROLLERS, I have "USB Mass Storage Device"). If they are listed as something similar, they can be removed by right clicking on them and selecting UNINSTALL or yo can click on them and hit the DEL key on the keyboard.

If they are not listed anywhere that you can easily identify, make sure nothing in there says UNKNOWN USB DEVICE, or that nothing has a yellow question mark or yellow exclamation point on them. If those are there, it could be that your Windows just didn't set the drivers up right the last time it loaded, for whatever reason. You can also delete those from the device manager.

Finally, you can click the button above the DEVICE MANAGER window that says SCAN FOR HARDWARE CHANGES, or you can RIGHT CLICK on the very top of the device manager list where it says COMPUTER and pick SCAN FOR HARDWARE CHANGES. (If you can't find either, you can reboot the PC and that should do it).
NOTE: You could optionally just power off your USB drives (or unplug the power cable if they have no button). When you power them back on, Windows should try to set them up again.

If that works, they may just start working again. (Or you could then check the DISK MANAGEMENT as listed in one of my previous posts and try to see if you then have the option to do the CHANGE DRIVE LETTERS AND PATHS fix.

If after Windows scans for new hardware, if it sets them back up as UNKNOWN USB DEVICE or something similar, or continues to give them a yellow question mark or exclamation point, then you may have some other problem with it, either the device could be going bad or it could possibly even need to have a new cable tried on it. Or you could UNINSTALL the drivers and move them to a completely new USB port incase the USB port is going bad. (Make sure you aren't using a USB HUB incase the USB HUB is going bad or running low on power or something.

Hopefully some of that will help! Let us know...