Your Western Digital hard drive suddenly stopped working. It was working fine all the while, but suddenly it has started having issues. But when the drive is connected with USB cable, the flashlight continuously blinks. Even using another USB cable didn’t help. So how to make Western Digital hard drive show up and work like before?
First of all, stop worrying. It is possible to fix this issue. So when WD external drive is not being detectable on your computer, but it is on, then here are the fixes that you can try out to resolve the issue:
Check USB cable / port
If Western Digital external hard drive is not being detected/fails to show up on PC, then connect it to another USB port, and see if it works. Or else use another new USB cable to connect the WD drive and see whether it shows up on your computer.
Clean virus or malware
If your Western Digital external hard drive is infected by virus/malware, then you need to immediately clean the device. When the external drive is infected by virus or malware, you may not be able to access data or even open the drive when connected to PC. If the PC is infected, then clean it too, as when an external drive is connected to it, there are chances of the drive getting corrupted.
Change Drive letter
- Go to This PC – Right click and select Manage
- In the Computer Management window, go to Disk Management and right-click WD external hard drive
- Select Change Drive Letter and Paths. option
- Assign a new driver letter to the Western Digital hard drive and save all changes
- You should now be able to see the WD external hard drive on your system
After fixing the issue, and making Western Digital drive recognizable on your computer, you need to recover data. This can be done safely with the help of Hi5 Partition Recovery software. This tool will recover data from Western Digital drive in a quick and easy manner. Even if you had formatted WD external drive and files were erased, you can recover them with the help of this software.
