I there I think I have made a big mistake by using my laptop power cord to power up my Western Digital 500gb external drive because it now does not want to work! I have accepted that i might of burnt it out because of the voltage being higher on my laptop power cord but was just wondering if there is any chance of saving the drive with a new part or something? Any help and advice would be great! cheers
Ouch! You most likely have fried something, with any luck it'll be the caddy and not the drive inside; Your best bet would be to open the caddy and put the drive into a new one and see if it'll work. It's not a particularly difficult job, but most computer stores should do it for you if you're not comfortable doing it yourself.
If that does not work, you may want to try swapping the circuit board on the drive. The only thing is that you need to get the exact one. Not nearly exact, but exact. If not, you may do some damage. Otherwise, send it to a data recovery company, and they can source these types of things.
Sending the drive to a data recovery center would be a little pricey i'd think. Hopefully you didn't put anything mission critical on it.
It depends on what the data is worth, but if it is not worth the cost of data recovery, then try the others things mentioned here. If time is not an issue, then trying to find an identical drive is worth the time.