My WD external HD "element" will not turn on - Western Digital Elements powered by WD 320 GB External USB (WDE1U3200N) Hard Drive

You need either need a driver to detect the hard disk or you will have to format hd.

The obvious question first is the drive connected with the provided AC adapter?

Are you connecting it directly to a USB port or powered USB Hub? This is not important in external hard drives but it does on portable HD. But just in case keep this in mind.


Other thing is that you have to install the WD Smartware software.

If nothing works, try it on another computer.

If it works, must be a USB port problem.

God Bless You!

Go to Administrative Tools in Control Panel. Computer Management then Storage, Disk Management. You'll probably have to recognise it and assign a drive number.

Something might have happened to the driver. You might need to reinstall it.

hi there could be a couple of things you can try, you could, ( if you have xp ) have the drive in, then go to my computer, then tools, then folder options, click, view, then look down the list for show hidden files and folders, that's one, the other is to take the drive caddy apart, remove the hard drive ( as they are just normal hdd's in external boxes ) connect it up to a spare port on your desktop computer and see if you can transfer files that way, ( note! this will void the warranty on the drive case if you do this if it is still under warranty ) the other way would be to get a data recovery program, like winundelete, which you should be able to find on either your computer or the net for free, hope this will help

It sounds like it is trying to boot from the external drive, go into the BIOS settings and disable boot from external device and see if that cures it.

Try running Scan Disk and defrag. Otherwise use a program like SpinRite to do a low level scan of the disk.

Good luck

yes you need the cd. you will have to go to western digital support and get the cd

If you are using Windows Vista then format your external drive with exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table, aka FAT64), or NTFS. And if you are using Windows XP then only solution is to format drive with NTFS file system.
How to do that, just right click on HD from My Computer an click format.

Hi bobo08,

I'd first check to see if the drive is working correctly with some utilities that WD provides, then once you determine if the drive works, you can either return it the retailer or it's working correctly by using these utilities. Here's the link to that drive. HERE

Good Luck

Mark