External hard drive fault?

I did a Google search & couldn’t find anything about an access hole or a lock feature.

Anyhow, there’s lots of advice (some of it contradictory!) on how to open the drive’s case, should you care to venture into hardware troubleshooting. The best advice along these lines, at online discussion boards, seems to be:

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“Hi, I have a Hitachi 1.0 TB LS-1000-EMEA. It is not being recognized by any computer although when connected it goes through the normal startup sequence (blue light + drive spinning up).”
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“The light and the sound are signaling that the unit gets powered. If it doesn’t get recognized then there’s a problem with the logic controllers – either the one on the case or the one on the hard disk itself have failed.

“To find out which, you need to open the case, take out the hard disk and put it directly in a desktop pc. If it’s recognized and accessible then the controller of the case is faulty – you will need a new case. If it’s not then the hard disk itself is dead and you need a new external USB HD.”

Yep. There are three things that can fail there; your USB ports, the drive controller, and the drive itself. Odds are that it’s the drive controller; drives are pretty rugged these days, and USB port issues cause other problems.

The lock icon and hole is just for security, it’s called a K-Lock or K-slot

You should make sure the problem doesn’t lie with parts of your system other than the external hard drive. To rule this out, try any of the following:

-Plug another hard drive or flash drive into the same USB port;

-If you have another USB port or hub that is working, try plugging your hard drive into that;

-Try downloading/installing any of the plethora of hard drive recovery utilities for Windows (Mac OS has a free one already available in the Utilities section of the Apps folder);

-Try plugging your hard drive into another computer to see if it mounts there;

-Try replacing the USB cable that connects your hard drive to your computer;

Often times, it can be any one of those symptoms that cause a hard drive not to mount. Other times, it could be a power handling issue on the USB bus (as in, the bus is not providing sufficient power to the hard drive). Many possibilities, so good luck.

I’m confused. Have you used this hard drive on this computer in the past, and now it won’t work? Or did you use the drive to collect data from another computer, and now want to use it with this one?

I’d bank with @jerv‘s answer that it’s most likely the controller.
All four of the busted external drives folks have brought to my bench had that problem, the drives inside were ok.
Open the thing up and remove the drive and jack it into an appropriate “adapter” like this.

How to remove the hard disk from the LS-1000-US base? Two small screws are easy to remove, but the hard disk still sticks on its base, any idea what should i do next to remove this 1TB SATA disk?

Unfortunate update: I’ve encountered an external that had failure that was Not due to the USB interface, the only one out of six that wasn’t due to USB. The other five had drives that were perfectly operational.
This one is a WD5000 that is displaying click-of-death symptoms and may be impractical to recover.

@Ahdzen there are maybe more screws… or sometimes plastic tabs etc.
Try some ‘encouragement’ with flatblade screwdrivers and see where the resistance seems to be keeping the drive from freeing.

@Ahdzen While it’s most common for an internal drive to use just the 4 side screws, some external drives use bottom screws as well or instead. I can’t recall ever seeing one mounted with just 2 screws though.