ill give it a shot

[BawA]

ok i probably know ill get to no where and am pretty sure the damage has been done but ill give it a try...

i have a WD MyBook 500Gb, as you may know its an external HDD...

one morning i woke up to see that utorrent is giving an error of not being able to browse/locate a downloaded file, i went to browse the folder and it want exploring, i had to restart but to my guessing since the drive wasn't responding the windows couldn't restart, i tried to use the power button on mybook but it wasnt responding either, one foolish thing i did was to unplug the HDD power cord, so now when windows comes up, chkdsk runs and it finds hell lot of Orphaned files and start deleting them, i didnt know whats orphaned files so i let it to delete them, it took quit a time and in process i saw it recovering some of those file as well, anyway when windows came up i went to drive and saw that around 400Gb of file is missing, ok so those orphaned files were my data which windows deleted them.
but yet my drive was functional, i tried a bunch of recovery programs to recover some of my files and i did, in between i had similar problem to what i had when all of this started(non responding drive) but after a restart it used to respond again. but then it came to complete halt were it wasnt assessable so i thought i would format it, i used writezero feature which came with datalife guard software of WD, it took five hours after that i had to format with windows tools and it worked for 2 minutes and again halted, only this time i hear a spin sound similar to when the HDD used to come up before but it used to end up with a click sound and thats it, now it only spin and then rests and again same, it looks like that driver or something which it needs is missing on the drive it self, even windows hardware profile lists it but cant find any driver for it.

any1 knows how to bring the drive back on before i decide to buy another1.
also give me some good advices on 1TB and 500GB internal drives if mybook is beyond repair now.

also a word of advice... God always watches you, remember when i said utorrent gave a missing folder error, well that folder was a porn i started to download at night(from TTi) so i could see it on next day when i had my dayoff.

[Detale]

I had the a MyBook 500 and mine crapped out as well, how long have you had it? You may be able to get a new one under warranty as I did. Try it anyway put in the serial number and see what happens. If you never registered it they will ask when you bought it, just say you don't remember but it was like 8 or 9 months ago because you have a 1 year warranty with them.

Now I had the same click, spin, stop that it sounds like you have and it was done for. I had tried everything. Also do you might have to initialize your drive? What cable are you using to connect it? ( USB, FireWire) Ii had problems with the firewire a while back and so I used USB turns out it was my cord I got a new one and all worked well from then on.

[Chewie]

If a hard drive gives a loud click and then becomes inaccessible, it's near death and any data on it should be backed up as soon as possible.

I don't know how long you've had it but a 500GB can't be more than 18 months old, surely. Check the WD site for guarantee information and you could find it's covered.

Personally, I think there's little between the major makes as far as reliability goes. I've seen a few WD drives give up in the fashion I describe above but in the last couple years I've seen two Maxtor s do it, one of which was mine and I still bought another Maxtor to go with the replacement they sent me.

[clocker]

Although I have nothing against WD drives in general, I've developed a healthy aversion to whatever they're using in the MyBook series simply because of the number of failures people report.

Given my druthers, I go with Seagates and the 500GB series (either Seagate or WD) seem to be the sweet spot pricewise.