Hi, I recently had an issue with my WD external HD (the one that I had all my files backed up to).

WD said the drive failed. I can hear it spin up, but my OS does not recognize the drive so I was thinking the communications board that piggy backs onto the drive is what failed. To test that theory I removed the drive from the case and plugged the drive directly into my motherboard (and connected power).

I enabled the drive in the bios (I tried port 1 and 2, port 0 is my primary drive). During boot it seems the computer recognizes the drive and labels it a 2TB WD drive, but the booting screen just freezes and nothing loads. I removed the drive and turned off the ports to get my computer to boot again.

Does this sound like the drive is what has failed or is there something else I have to do to install a second HD. I honestly never have done this before.

Is this a 2TB drive or is it actually a different capacity? You didn't say whether the reported 2TB capacity was correct or not, but I'm guessing that you're trying to say this reported capacity was wrong...? If a non-2TB drive is reported in the BIOS as a 2TB drive, that is effectively "game over" for anything which you can do, and you would need to choose a DR company with suitable experience & equipment to recover your data, if the data is valuable to you. The fact that the PC also does not boot with that drive installed, confirms that the drive has a problem.

There are some members of the board in the US who could be recommended, if you need help choosing a reputable company.

You didn't give the exact WD model of external disk, but FYI for most of them, you also can't remove the USB to SATA adapter (which is what you seem to be describing) and then access the existing data on the drive via SATA, even if the drive was working. This is due to the encryption/decryption done by that adapter. However that situation on its own would not cause the PC to fail to boot, nor would the BIOS report an incorrect drive capacity.

More details would help to determine type of failure.

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