WD 500BPV external stopped working

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

My WD 500 GB stopped working - that has a lot of movies and TV on it (season 4 of the Walking Dead). It started acting up the past week (playback would keep hesitating) until it got unbearable Sunday. So I started trying to pull files off it, and I can’t even do that now (it tries for a while, then says it can’t read the file). And that is even when I try one at a time.

Is there any way to recover the files, or am I out of luck?

2

PS… you can Explore the drive - look at the files, but you can’t copy them or play them now.

3

Hi and welcome to the WD community.

Try  to run a diagnostic on the drive, you can also try a different usb cable or  access the unit from a diferent computer and see if it is posisble to get the data.

Here is a link that might help you diagnose the unit:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/940 

4

I pulled the drive out of it’s plastic home and put it in a HD caddy - same results.  I ran diagnostics on it that said “failed”.  The link you provided doesn’t work.

I (on the advice of a few people) have put it in the freezer for an hour.  Supposedly that may help.  We’ll see.

5

I have the same, or very similar problem with my WD Elements 1T. The computer is recognizing it as a local drive, I am not able to view the files, and the WD light is still on and occasionally blinking. I would really like to have some help on saving my files and fixing my drive. It was purchased in May of this year :( 

Please help!

6

Well, this morning I put the HD in the freezer for 2.5 hours, and was able to copy some file off of it.  It would stall and fail on the larger files (2GB+), but other files for the most part I was able to salvage some.  It was slower than normal, so I just got what I really needed.  I copied using a program called TeraCopy.  I don’t know if that helped the process or not, but the freezer did.

Also, this HD is almost 4 years old, just FYI

Micallen