WD Essentials USB Drive slow performance / as an Internal Disk?

[nomad9491]

Hey folks, It's been a while since I was last here. I need your expert advice again;

I have a Western Digital My Book Essential 2tb drive. It was working perfectly fine for over 6 months since I purchased it. but the performance has nearly stopped / come to a halt over 2 months ago. I was stuck on an Island all this time so I didn't bother with it until now... I have over 1.2TB of data on it.

It takes so long to open the drive from my computer, takes forever to open any file or folder or to / copy & cut even a text document
I have tried on different USB ports, on different laptops / PC's but its still the same.
I absolutely need to access / copy the files on the drive and I really dunno how to... it says 63days remaining when I try to copy everything to another hard drive...!!

I just tried connecting it to my laptop.. it wouldnt load the drive / took over 10 minutes so I took the drive apart..

So now... I've taken the hard disk out of its enclosure.. connected it to my desktop PC (Dual Core 3.6ghz/XPSP3/4gbDDR2 RAM / 1GB ATI Graphics) as an internal drive.. its' not showing up in my computer anymore. I went to disk management and the drive is showing as an "uninitialized disk". I did not initialize it as I suspect it will result in loss of all data.

Now I have getdata recover my files pro running on the disk.. so far it hasn't shown any files / partitions. Any suggestions or help to recover the data??!

---------- Post added at 07:54 AM ---------- Previous post was at 07:43 AM ----------

PS I've also tried with different USB cables..
and the hard disk doesn't make any unusual clicking noises (although I can hear it spinning / I have another WD essentials - makes the same amount of noise)

[hal9000]

Have you used used any encryption or passwords on the drive using Smartware or something similar? If so, that could be why it's an "uninitialized disk" when connected through the desktop PC.

Perhaps you could run WD Data LifeGuard Diagnostics and see what it says. If it comes up ok, try a Chkdsk [drive] /f on it. You could try a /r but it will take forever.

Are you running getdata when connected to usb? As you can actually see the files there it will be the best way.