Drive spinning up. Can't find HDD in my computer.

1

My drive is spinning up, but I can’t find the drive on the computer. I am running 64bit Windows 7. Went to device manger and found the drive, unable to assign a letter or path. I just want to copy data to the connected computer.

2

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Plugable support! I’d be more than happy to assist you with this issue.

Are you connecting the hard drive through one of our docks? What kind of computer did the drive come out of? Do you know how it might be formatted (NTFS, FAT32, etc)?

Please don’t hesitate to let us know of other questions.

Thanks again for contacting Plugable support and best wishes!

Joshua Henry
Plugable Technologies

3

Hi Josh,

I am using a Plugable USB3-SATA-U3 docking station. The drive came out of a Western Digital MyBook external hard drive enclosure that was networked on my home wifi. Not sure how it is formatted.

As I said earlier, I see the hard drive in device manager, but I am unable to assign a drive letter and/or map the drive. I added in a couple of screen grabs while in device manager.

Dave !](https://d2r1vs3d9006ap.cloudfront.net/s3_images/978057/DeviceManager_inline.jpg?1383007052)](https://d2r1vs3d9006ap.cloudfront.net/s3_images/978057/DeviceManager.jpg?1383007052) !](https://d2r1vs3d9006ap.cloudfront.net/s3_images/978058/DeviceManager2_inline.jpg?1383007070)](https://d2r1vs3d9006ap.cloudfront.net/s3_images/978058/DeviceManager2.jpg?1383007070)

4

Hello,

Typically Western Digital Network Attached Storage External Drives are formatted with a Linux EXT3 or EXT4 format. Windows cannot read this, which would explain why you cannot add drive letters to the partitions.

Please don’t hesitate to let us know of other questions.

Thanks again for contacting Plugable support and best wishes!

Joshua Henry
Plugable Technologies

5

One option for you may be to look into a free Linux distribution that you can recover your data with.

We can’t help you set this up or support it unfortunately but I can point you in the right direction:

Using a program called VirtualBox:
https://www.virtualbox.org/

You can run a version of Linux (for example, Ubuntu http://www.ubuntu.com/ ) inside your Windows computer in which you may be able to read the drive in Linux and transfer the data you need to your computer.

There are a lot of specific details but all the information should be available with a little research and maybe asking some questions on an online forum: http://community.ubuntu.com/help-info…

6

I also tried to access the HDD via the docking station on my Chromebook, which supports EXT3, and EXT4 but was unable to access it there either. I did see it though.

7

If you can give me the model # of your Western Digital Network Attached External Drive I can see if I can verify what format it uses.

Since the dock sees the drive and partitions on both Windows and Chromebook, the dock itself is at least functioning properly. We just need to figure out how to read the data.

8

The Model # is WD5000G032.

9

I was able to recover my files using a free linux recovery tool from http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-re… thanks for your help Josh you pointed me in the right direction!