Nowhere at all, in any tool
Not detected by the operating system or its disk utility. Points at the bridge board, the cable, the power path, or a genuinely dead drive. This is where the four checks above earn their keep.
Hardware
Four things sit between your files and the screen — cable, port, power and the bridge board inside the case — and three of them are cheaper to rule out than the disk. Work outward before assuming the worst.
A drive spinning quietly and never appearing points at the electronics. One that clicks, ticks, or spins up and stops points at the mechanism. Those two situations call for opposite responses.
Four things sit between your files and the screen. Three of them are cheaper to rule out than the fourth.
USB cables fail internally with nothing visible outside, and the one supplied with a drive is usually the cheapest component in the box. Swap it for a known-good one before anything else.
Go straight into the machine rather than through a hub, monitor or keyboard. A bus-powered 2.5-inch drive can fail to spin on a hub that cannot supply enough current, and it behaves exactly like a dead disk.
3.5-inch externals run from an external brick, and those fail more often than the drives inside them. Match voltage, current and polarity from the label — a substitute of the correct rating costs a few pounds.
This separates a drive fault from a machine, driver or operating-system fault in about a minute, and tells you which problem you actually have.
Spinning quietly and never appearing points at the bridge board, with a healthy disk behind it. Clicking or scraping points at the mechanism — unplug it and do not plug it back in to check.
The same drive can be absent in one place and present in another, and each combination means something different.
Not detected by the operating system or its disk utility. Points at the bridge board, the cable, the power path, or a genuinely dead drive. This is where the four checks above earn their keep.
The drive is detected and communicating. It has no drive letter, no readable partition, or a file system Windows does not understand. That is a logical fault and considerably better news.
Detected, with a partition found and a file system that cannot be read. Decline the format offer — it writes a new structure over the one a recovery would rebuild from.
The capacity is correct so the drive is fine; the partition table describing where volumes live has been lost. A few hundred bytes, and everything else is untouched.
The single most damaging thing people do to an undetected external, and it is done with good intentions.
Most modern WD My Passport and My Book units encrypt their contents by hardware, whether or not anyone set a password. The encryption key lives on the small USB bridge board inside the enclosure, not on the disk.
So removing the drive and connecting it directly — which is a perfectly sensible instinct, and works fine on many other brands — presents a disk full of ciphertext. Windows reads it as unformatted and offers to initialise it. Accepting that does real damage to a drive that was healthy, and the original bridge board is now the only thing that can decrypt what is on it.
If you have already shucked a WD drive: keep the enclosure and the board. Do not discard it, and send it in with the disk. Without it a recovery is materially harder and sometimes impossible.
Persistence helps with cables. It does not help with any of these.
Any noise it did not make before. Clicking, grinding, scraping or a buzz with no spin. Mechanical faults get measurably worse each time the drive runs, and the time between the first noise and the power switch is the biggest factor in what comes back.
It appears, then vanishes, repeatedly. A drive that mounts for a few seconds and drops off is either a failing bridge or a drive stalling on unreadable sectors. Each cycle is another opportunity for something unhelpful to be written.
Windows offers to format, initialise or repair it. None of those recover anything. All of them write. If you have got as far as being offered a fix, the useful move is to decline and disconnect.
A different cable, then a different port directly on the machine rather than through a hub, then the power supply on a desktop unit, then a different computer entirely. Those four cost nothing and resolve a large share of undetected externals.
That the drive is detected and communicating, which is good news. It has no drive letter, no readable partition, or a file system Windows cannot interpret — a logical fault rather than a hardware failure.
Not on a WD unit. Most modern My Passport and My Book drives encrypt by hardware with the key held on the USB bridge board, so a bare disk reads as unformatted even when perfectly healthy. Keep the enclosure and send it with the drive.
No. That message means the partition or file system cannot be read, not that your data has gone. Formatting writes a new structure over exactly the one a recovery would use to rebuild your files.
Almost certainly not. Correct capacity means the drive itself is responding. What has been lost is the partition table — a few hundred bytes at the front of the disk describing where volumes begin. Everything else is untouched.
The moment it makes a noise it has not made before, if it mounts and drops off repeatedly, or if Windows starts offering to format or repair it. Beyond those points, further attempts reduce what can be recovered.