# Western digital external 2tb drive, write protected, not showing in my computer



## brendo8686

Hi there
i have a wd 2tb external which is new
Used for first time at familys house-brang home same day and coppied stuff off my other external to it
left on over night to copy everything over
woke up to windows saying some files directory names were too long so cancelled the last 1 percent of copying over
didnt cancell so i forced it to by turning off pc or pulling out the usb cable (cant remember which but one of the two is what i would have done)

this was all in the space of about 48 hours of opening the box and using the drive

now its not showing up in my computer
disk management says it not initialized-wont let me run mbr or gpt-says its write protected

ive dowloaded heaps of tools including WD's diagnostic tool
WD tool says theres too many bad sectors

im no expert but dont bad sectors take ages to form? not 48hrs?

any advice would be good


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## Nanobyte

You don't seem to have found the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the System Tray.  Disconnecting a USB drive in the middle of data transfers is likely to screw it up as you seem to have illustrated.  That can cause loss of data or a corrupt file system.

I'm not sure how you recover.  You may need to reformat the drive.  I would look in Disk Management in Administrative Tools to see if the drive is still shown (with no drive letter).  Someone else may have some brilliant ideas.


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## brendo8686

Nanobyte said:


> You don't seem to have found the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the System Tray.  Disconnecting a USB drive in the middle of data transfers is likely to screw it up as you seem to have illustrated.  That can cause loss of data or a corrupt file system.
> 
> I'm not sure how you recover.  You may need to reformat the drive.  I would look in Disk Management in Administrative Tools to see if the drive is still shown (with no drive letter).  Someone else may have some brilliant ideas.



There wasnt really a choice
It doesnt show a drive letter in DM
Any ideas on how to format it?


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## Nanobyte

brendo8686 said:


> There wasnt really a choice
> It doesn't show a drive letter in DM


Does it show the drive though?  If it does, treat like a new drive.  Have you tried rebooting the PC?



> Any ideas on how to format it?


I'm not expert on this but you could remove the actual HDD from its enclosure and connect to your PC.  Then format.  I assume a new drive would be SATA.

As I said before, wait and see if anyone else has ideas.


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## brendo8686

Nanobyte said:


> Does it show the drive though?  If it does, treat like a new drive.  Have you tried rebooting the PC?
> 
> 
> I'm not expert on this but you could remove the actual HDD from its enclosure and connect to your PC.  Then format.  I assume a new drive would be SATA.
> 
> As I said before, wait and see if anyone else has ideas.




restarted, reconected, uninstalled it than plugged it in again, different usb port and everything else i could think of

I just wont believe that by doing what ive done it has permenantly destroyed something in the drive. what ever i have caused if it was me should be able to be 100 percent fixed right


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## johnb35

If the western digital diagnostic said it had too many bad sectors then if its under warranty, replace it.  Drives can go bad at any time, there is no time limit on when they go bad.  You could have caused the damage by pulling the cable out, its not certain, especially when the drive was in the middle of doing something.


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## brendo8686

johnb35 said:


> If the western digital diagnostic said it had too many bad sectors then if its under warranty, replace it.  Drives can go bad at any time, there is no time limit on when they go bad.  You could have caused the damage by pulling the cable out, its not certain, especially when the drive was in the middle of doing something.



i see
ive been pulling cables out on externals for years
pulling it out while the drive isnt copying or deleting files etc should be fine yeah? or is ejecting always recomended?


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## johnb35

Ejecting a usb device is always recommended.  But like i said, it may or may not have been what you did to cause the drive to go bad.  You need to get it replaced.


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