My WD MyBook external hard drive is not working, what can I do?

First make sure that you aren’t just having cable trouble. Swap out the cable, and use a different port on the computer. Also make sure the power supply to the external drive is properly plugged in. If you still cannot get it to work, you have learned an extraordinarily valuable lesson: every single spinning disk drive will eventually fail. That is why you must always have a backup of your data someplace else.

@pdworkin well then I guess lesson will be learned. Is there anything you think I can do? Does data recovery really work?

Yes, there are places that can recover your data, but it is an expensive undertaking. If you have irreplaceable things on that drive that you care about deeply, I think you will have to hold your nose and spend the money.

I pay $4 a month to Mozy for online backup. I have over 500 gigabytes stored on their servers. They sell unlimited space, and it’s a good program. I sure don’t miss the $ a month, and the Mozy program has never interfered my my computer’s performance. Here is a link

Remove the disk from the enclosure, and put it in your computer. Here’s how.

@ratboy will this also work on a iMac???

There is no guarantee that it will work in any case; it is just one more thing to try before giving up. It could be that some component of the enclosure has been damaged, and the actual disk has not—in this case your data will still be readable. On the other hand, if the disk is broken, you’ll have wasted a lot of effort. You can do it with an iMac, but it’s not so easy—see here. By the way, something like this makes it unnecessary to dismantle your computer.

Thanks everyone for the great wisdom. For some weird reason it stopped working with my Mac but it still works with PC. Using a zip drive to transfer info over.