In most cases the disk inside is perfectly healthy and something between it and your computer has failed — a cable, a port, a bridge board, or a partition table. Working through them in order costs nothing and solves it more often than not.
A drive that spins quietly but never appears points at electronics. A drive that clicks, ticks or spins up and down points at the mechanism — and those two need opposite responses.
Start with the cable, because it is the commonest fault and the cheapest to eliminate — USB cables fail internally with no visible damage, and the one supplied with the drive is often the flimsiest thing in the chain. Then try a different port, ideally one directly on the machine rather than through a hub, since a 2.5-inch drive drawing power over USB can simply fail to spin on an underpowered hub. If it is a 3.5-inch desktop unit with a power brick, substitute the brick if you can; dead power supplies masquerade as dead drives constantly.
Then try another computer entirely. It separates a drive fault from a machine fault in about a minute.
A drive can be present without having a drive letter. On Windows, open Disk Management: if the disk appears there but shows as unallocated, RAW, or without a letter, the hardware is working and the problem is the partition or file system. On a Mac, Disk Utility with “Show All Devices” enabled does the same job — a physical device listed with no mountable volume beneath it tells you the same story.
This distinction matters more than anything else you can check: a drive visible to the system but not mountable is a file-system problem, and those are usually recoverable. A drive not visible at all is electronics or mechanics.
Put the drive to your ear as it powers up. A quiet spin with no clicking, followed by nothing appearing, strongly suggests the USB bridge board rather than the disk — and on external drives the bridge fails at least as often as the mechanism. That is a recoverable situation with a healthy disk behind it.
Clicking, ticking, grinding or a repeated spin-up-and-stop means the mechanism. Unplug it. Nothing you can do at a desk improves that situation and every further attempt makes it worse.
It is tempting to remove the disk from a failed enclosure and connect it directly. Don’t — particularly with Western Digital. On most modern My Passport and My Book units the encryption key lives on the bridge board, so a bare disk reads as unformatted even when it is perfect, and letting Windows initialise it at that point does real damage. Send external drives whole, with the original enclosure.
A single external drive is from £300 +VAT after a free 48-hour diagnostic and a written quote, and most jobs are no fix, no fee.
Most often a cable, port, power supply or bridge board rather than the disk itself. Work through them in order — different cable, different port directly on the machine, different computer — then check whether the drive appears in Disk Management or Disk Utility even without a drive letter.
That the hardware is working and the problem is the partition table or file system. This is generally recoverable. Don’t accept any prompt to initialise or format, because that writes a new partition table over the information needed to rebuild the old one.
No, especially with a WD drive. On most modern My Passport and My Book units the encryption key sits on the bridge board, so a bare disk reads as unformatted even when it is healthy — and initialising it at that point causes real damage. Send external units complete.
Yes. Clicking, ticking or grinding means the mechanism, not the electronics, and every further power-on spreads the damage. Unplug it and leave it off; no cable change or software will help, and a surface scan will make it worse.
From £300 plus VAT for a single external drive, fixed in a written quote after a free 48-hour diagnostic. Most jobs are no fix, no fee; clean-air or donor work carries a 50% deposit with the balance payable only on success.