My Book is Not Being Seen by Windows

OK, so the most popular external drives on the market have to be the My Book and The Passport. I get a ton of calls every week about them, and I don’t believe it is because it is not a good product but more because they are being SO widely used. So lets start with the main problem I get called about which is that Windows is not seeing the drive at all when it is plugged in. The customer does not even receive the BONG noise that a USB drive has been hooked up. Now in most cases the device seems to still be getting power.

Consumer Electronics (CE) hard disks are specifically manufactured for the PVR market. CE drives are not generally available in retail stores, and can only be purchased through authorized resellers, such as XtendedPlay. Data recovery on these drives however,  is sometimes possible.

Here is a list of some of the most common faults we get asked to perform data recovery for:

“I want to recover excel file from a defunct hard drive”.

“This is my auxiliary drive with ALL family data Seemingly Hard disk head fault. PC boots fine. Win XP runs slowly, identifies hardware but does not read any formatted data or active partition”.

“Freecom portable external Usb hard drive 400Gb capacity – had wrong adaptor plugged into it – will not work – took to local computer repairer – they could not get it to be detected by any PCs they had – data is very important as it contains many photos and research material”.