Last night a very harsh and random lightning strike did 2 things: 1.) I heard an extremely loud pop, which I thought was my ethernet port (cable runs underneath the house and to the router in another room) - perhaps it was my ethernet port, but the port on my end is fine, the port at the router's end was killed 2.) My Western Digital 1TB external hard drive which has literally thousands of dollars worth of data and other property (I work online) is now not functioning. The LCD light is on, but the drive will not show up in My Computer. I've unplugged and replugged every cord, from the AC adapter to the USB connecting it. Sometimes when I disconnect and reconnect, I get a tray icon stating that a USB device has malfunctioned and is not recognized. Please tell me my drive was not killed? How can I go about fixing this?
This usually means that the USB circuit has been fried. To get the data off the drive, you have two options: First of all, you need to open the external drive enclosure and see if it's an IDE (big ribbon cable) or SATA (small cable) drive. Using that information, you have 2 options: 1) Buy a new hard drive enclosure (either IDE or SATA depending on the drive). OR 2) Connect the drive directly to the motherboard of your computer and read the data from there.
Would it even be worth a shot or possible that maybe the USB/firewire cable connecting the drive to the computer went bad and I could try replacing that first? I don't know if that makes sense because when I unplug this wire, my drive powers down, so it looks as if the drive works, but then again it's also looking as if the USB circuit works considering the LCD on the drive goes on and off when I plug and unplug it.
Usually a cable can resist a much larger amount of electricity than a circuit. I think the data controller chip has been damaged, but you could try a different cable just to be certain.
