Hey all,
I've had my WD 300GB External HDD for approx. 3 years now, maybe longer, and it's been running fine with no problems at all. Two days ago when my PC was booting up, my external began acting weird. Normally when my external would boot with the PC, it would whirr up a little and a click sound would follow. Now when it boots up with my PC, it whirrs a little (I think shorter than normally) and then two clicks follow and then it whirrs down. It'll repeat this about 3 times after which it doesn't do anything else, probably signifying a problem.
Now I have all my shit stored on this drive, everything from apps, games, and source codes to movies, music, and pics. You can probably imagine how I felt when this happened the first time so I won't go into much detail there. I almost cried when Windows booted up and my external HDD was nowhere in My Computer. So what did I do? I didn't cry, I unplugged the bitch. First I unplugged the USB cable, but the HDD didn't power down so I unplugged the power source. After a few seconds I plugged them back in, power source first; then USB cable. To my suprise, when it powered on this time it worked like normal. My external booted up, my drive was finally available amongst the rest, and all my files were in tact... great! I figured all my problems were over, but they weren't.
After I got tired enough to pull myself away from the monitor, I shut down my PC and hit the hay. Today when I goto boot up my PC, my external does the same shit; a little whirr followed by two clicks. Needless to say I wasn't that shocked, and figured it wouldn't take much to get it working again. So I unplugged it from my PC, USB then power source; same order as before. After which I plugged the power source back in, but left the USB unplugged until Windows booted up. This is what I thought would fix the problem, but again the same two clicks followed. After about 3-5 minutes of unplugging and re-plugging I decided to say fuck it and take the damn thing apart, maybe one of the internal connections became loose or something. The problem with that was I couldn't find any screws to take out (here I come YouTube), I'm not going to break it just to get at the HDD inside (remember the valuable files?). The next thing I decided to try was plugging it into a different USB slot, that didn't work either. Now I'm going crazy, screaming WTF!!, trying to figure out the problem without ripping the casing apart. Then when all else failed, I thought about my laptop and tried plugging the external into it. Shockingly that actually worked and my external loaded up. Now at this point I'm relieved, I figured wow since it finally booted on my laptop I can plug it back into my PC. Boy was I wrong... AGAIN! I did just that and it did the two click shit again and wouldn't boot up. Now I'm back in crazy mode, I tried plugging it back into my laptop to see if it would work and nothing came out of that. So I plugged it back into my PC, again with the two clicks... I unplug it, fiddle with the wires some (maybe the connection in the back of the external is bad?), plug it back in (this goes on for at least 5 minutes). Finally after all of that I plugged it in one last time and it loaded my external on my PC.
The weirdest thing about all this is that once the external is booted and working on a machine, it stays working. Even if I go away and it shuts down like it does after no activity, the power stays running to it so it will always come on when I try accessing it later. I don't understand it, I read that it could be a connection problem but if that was the case wouldn't it cause problems even after it does the initial boot? I haven't done anything to make it act up either, never dropped it or spilled anything on it. It stays in the same spot constantly and all I keep is bottled water in my room, no glass or cup drinks near my PC.
I ordered a new Seagate 1.5TB internal HDD and it'll get here in a day or two so I just have to get by until then and hope it doesn't completely crash, then I can transfer all my files onto that one. Maybe someone can shed a little light on my dilemma, I've never had this happen and was wondering what can be the cause? Could it just be that it's reached it's limit? I don't have an extra USB cable so I can't test the connection. I guess I'll just wait for my new HDD and then take it apart to avoid losing anything. I hope you enjoyed the story.