wilkes

sonflower, you should beable to take it out of the case and hook it up inside tower. If it still does not work then the data will be expenseive to restore.

If you hook it up inside your tower, be sure to use the slave connection on the ribbon.

Take it from a guy whose hard-drive crashed last month...on my work computer. YOU MUST BACK-UP EVERYTHING, on-site, and off-site.

Traditional wisdom is that you need three copies of a file to really "have" the file. One on your main system, one on secondary media (an external drive, a cd or dvd, or flash drive), and a third off-site.

Because I took that advice to heart, even though I lost not just the hard drive in my work computer with years of radio production and over 100 radio shows, and also lost my backup drive the very next day, I actually didn't "lose" any work...because I had a THIRD backup off-site (Mozy...which backs-up files every evening while I sleep), and I copied my backup drive before it failed. TWO OF MY THREE COPIES OF MY FILES FAILED IN A 24 HOUR PERIOD, and yet I lost nothing. The night my internal hard-drive died, I copied everything from the backup drive onto my laptop, so I had another on-site copy of my files. It took all night!

Don't just back-up, back-up multiple times, on-site and off. Then, and only then, do you actually "have" your files!

RedneckHillyBilly hit it on the head - take the drive out of the case, and either try it in another case, or connected directly to another PC that supports that interface. If youre lucky, its the enclosure, not the drive that is bad - and it sounds like that is the problem, since the enclosure should be recognized via usb without a drive in it...

Forgot to say that they usually do not work with individuals, (primarily government and forensic) if you decide to give them a try, let me know and I'll ask them to contact you

In addition to what Blue Ridge Guy has suggested you could take the hard drive out of the case and hook it up directly to your computers IDE/SATA interface ( this would by pass the USB interface)

If the drive is not recognized at all recovery is iffy and expensive, there is a facility in Greenville, NC

but they charge $500 to look at it and prices go up from there, the last one I sent cost $650 and recovered zilch

Have you tried a different USB Cable and/or USB port?

Have you tried to access it using another computer?

I'm not 100% sure, but I think the folks @ Double Edge Technology could help you with data retrieval.

I have a Western Digital My Book Essential external drive that I purchased at Staples a couple of years ago. I keep my photos and some documents on this external drive. My computer no longer "recognizes" my external drive. It has power but the interface is just not there. I talked to a technicial at Western Digital. He said that I would need to take/send it to a Data Recovery shop to have the data extracted and transferred to another drive, etc. I know that Best Buy does this but is there anyone in Wilkes that can do this for me? Also, has anyone else had any problem with Western Digital? Thanks for any help!!!