Comments on: Western Digital My Book Problem Question and Answer

By: Jacqui Best

Jacqui Best — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:43:29 +0000

Shane,

Try changing all the folder and file options so that you can see system and hidden folder options. Also you will need to run a command prompt command for removing the hidden attribute from everything. Doing a search in Google for the virus should explain how to do this.

By: Jacqui Best

Jacqui Best — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:31:04 +0000

Tim,

I have seen this before on a bunch of different occasions. In ever instance it was a virus. I would recommend making sure you have the rights to see hidden and system files. Once you are sure of that you should see your files again and realize those other files you are seeing are actually .lnk’s

By: Jacqui Best

Jacqui Best — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:28:22 +0000

Woodrow,

WD makes a great drive, but like all HDD’s they have moving parts and when that is the case there is always the chance for failure. I would ask if you have tried taking the drive from the enclosure? If not that would be the first thing I would try.

By: Jacqui Best

Jacqui Best — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:48:33 +0000

Katlynn,

1. I have no idea why it destroy it. It is true there is some different kind of weird stuff going on with some of the newer Seagate and WD externals but nothing that removing them from the casing would prove fatal.
2. If the drive is showing up un-allocated but at least showing up I would just try data recovery software on it like Recover It All.

By: Katlynn

Katlynn — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:09:39 +0000

Oh I forgot to mention that I was told by a tech guy at Best Buy that removing it from the case would destroy it, the harddrive will not work in another case.

By: Katlynn

Katlynn — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:06:52 +0000

I have the same problem as most of the people above, bought a WD 1TB Ext HD about 2 years ago, have it almost filled with irreplaceable data – and now the computer does not see it. It powers up, shows that it’s being installed (on my new computer) and shows in the device manager – it shows in the disk management area too but as unallocated and empty. It was working fine until I moved about a month ago and now nothing. Can the data really be missing? I would love to run a program on this to retrieve my data but not sure how. As I said, it’s full of important files ( I dumped everything off old computers onto this for the move). I get the same response using other computers and other versions of windows (xp, vista, and 7). There is also no drive letter associated with it in the disk management. I’m not a computer novice, but this is one headache I have not been able to solve.

By: cliff

cliff — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:38:49 +0000

same problem – can’t see it and not in ‘manage’ disks.

I am not wasting my life on a piece of rubbish – its going straight back – think I had a lucky escape looking at all the problems above – lacie for me now!!!

By: Jacqui Best

Jacqui Best — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:03:43 +0000

Art,

It is a RAID 0 configuration. You will need to know the stripe size and off set in order to rebuild the array.

By: Jacqui Best

Jacqui Best — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:00:41 +0000

James,

Are you always “safely disconnecting” the essential before you unplug it?

By: James

James — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 08:05:20 +0000

Stupid WD Mybook essential 1 TB it is now the second time the unit has all of a sudden when it is connected to the PC it can not be seen by the Pc’s USB port. When you pull the drive apart and connect it to Via Sata connector you will find the Master boot record has been corrupted and the drive is seen as unalicated. I have had to use file recovery program (GetDataBack for NTFS) to recover my data . I suspect and hope it is the Sata to USB connector causing the issue as it also seem to have software on the unit. Contact WD and their are useless tried to redirect me to 3rd party recovery companies and hundred of $ to pay for a fix

By: Art

Art — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 23:12:09 +0000

So I have a Mybook 1TB (one of the earlier ones) . . . although it seems to spin up, it’s wasn’t recognized by Win7 or OSX. So, I dismantled the unit (it’s 2 500gb drives, of course) and plugged the drives in to the SATA slots left on my desktop. DiskManagement now sees them but how do I (software) duplicate whatever arrangement that originally made these “look” like a single 1TB drive?

Here’s the reading I get off Disk Management

Disk 1: 200mb Healthy (EFI System Partition), 931.2 GB Healthy (primary partition)
Disk 2: 465.76GB Unallocated

By: Woodrow

Woodrow — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 03:40:14 +0000

WD My Book Essential. New, worked for a couple weeks and quit. Plug power in – power light flashes on and goes off. This happens with USB plugged in or without USB plugged in. I’ve been reading allot of cases with same or similar problems. Is there something wrong with these drives? Is it a firmware/software problem or a hardware problem? If it is replaced by WD, I am reluctant to send it in with mt data on it. Is there anything I can do to get this thing up and running again? Is there a reset somewere or some procedure I can perform? All of the internal drives I purchased and installed were WD. This is giving me pause about WD reliability.

By: tim gerber

tim gerber — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:03:04 +0000

I have a 1.8 tera my book essential. I’ve never encountered any issues until now. I usually transfer photos using an HP laptop but my wife went to access the hd using her asus laptop and now a bunch of the photo files arent showing up? I always double and triple check that the file transfer takes, but every photo file from my iPhone dump shows 0kb in the file details. What can I do to recover these files? I tried accessing the files from my HP laptop but nothing. Thanks in advance!

By: Shane

Shane — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 08:10:34 +0000

I have a question regarding my WD 1TB my book device. Before we get started I want to mention that my laptop is running Windows 7 Pro. My laptop just recently got infected with the stupid Win 7 Security 2012 Virus and my Western Digital happened to be plugged in at the same time. Whenever I go to my computer and look at the icon for the WD 1TB device it shows that it still has everything on it but when I open it, there is nothing inside! What can I do to get those files back?

By: Jacqui Best

Jacqui Best — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 19:55:19 +0000

Wyatt,
It sounds like you may have a “degrading” head. I would try doing smaller amounts of data on the transfers. Another thing you might want to try is taking the hard drive out of the enclosure to help deal with any heat issues you may be having.

By: Sun

Sun — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 23:18:30 +0000

Open and remove the harddrives. If you are comfortable you my open your desktop and directly connect the harddrive, or buy ‘SATA IDE USB Converter ‘ device and then connec the harddrive to your computer through USB. you can access all your files

By: Wyatt

Wyatt — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:04:06 +0000

I have a WD 500 GB external drive and am haveing many of the same problems as others. I finally managed to get my computer to recognize the drive by switching the firewire port I plug into and then bought a new external drive to switch everything over to. My problem now is that when i try to transfer data off the drive it starts the transfer then stalls and just sits there with windows saying its still transfering but really nothing is happening ie no change in how much data has been transfered after an hour. Any suggestions?

By: Levi

Levi — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 07:59:26 +0000

I bought my WD My Book for Mac a little over a month ago. It’s been working great, but for some reason today it stopped working. I had the hard drive completely unplugged and when I plugged everything in like I always do the device did not show up on my computer. Usually it shows immediately on my screen, but I can’t find it anywhere, even if I specifically look on Disk Utility. When I initially plug everything in I can hear it configuring and working, but eventually it goes silent. The power/activity light blinks rapidly, faster than each second. So… I don’t understand why it isn’t showing up. It must have something to do with the USB, but I’m not sure what to do. Any ideas/solutions? Please and thank you.
P.S. What is the warranty on it? Can I send it to the manufacturer and get it replaced for free? What do I need to do?

By: Eva

Eva — Tue, 24 May 2011 11:18:28 +0000

Sorry – I cannot see it in my computer.

By: Eva

Eva — Tue, 24 May 2011 11:17:43 +0000

Hi,

I have a WD 1TB My Book and it suddently stopped working after having for over a year. I can see it in my computer and I can’t see it in the disk management area. I have taken the enclosure off and still nothing. How do I run recovery software on it if I can’t see it? I have all my photos and documents on it. Can someone help please.

Desperate!
Thanks Eva

By: Jacqui Best

Jacqui Best — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 21:02:29 +0000

Adam,

This is a common problem with external hard drives. All I can tell you to try is maybe take it out of the enclosure and try putting in a new one. If this does not work maybe try running recovery software on it.

By: Jacqui Best

Jacqui Best — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 19:21:14 +0000

Someone,

We do have the technology here to get that hard drive decrypted. It is not a feat easily accomplished. There is not “software” option for this because that would defeat the purpose of the encryption.

By: someone

someone — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 08:29:46 +0000

I bought a 1tb Western Digital external hard drive almost a year ago (July I think). I put a password on it that only I would know.
In february the usb port broke, then I recently purchased an enclosure case as well as SATA/IDE adapter, hoping that would solver my problem. However my hard drive showed up as unallocated data. I went to Best Buy where the genius there initialized my hard drive.

Two questions: 1) Is there any way I can get into my hard drive like decrypting the password I have on it?
2) Would there be any software that I could get full versions of for free to recover the data on my hard drive? Please let me know cause I’d really love to have my hard drive back. Thanks.

By: adam

adam — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 23:19:28 +0000

hi, i have a 1 TB external usb data storage, before i had gateway lap top with win vista and it was working very good with that computer . around three months ago i bought dell laptop with win 7 , and the data storage was working good at first month but after that the data storage start to stop working alot and everytime it gives me the messag ” format disk ” and now everytime i plug in the data storage to my computer always gives the same message and i cannot open it at all. so please help me if you can to get my data of that drive because i have important data on it .

thank you

By: Shubhendu Das

Shubhendu Das — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 03:17:27 +0000

I had similar issue..
Try turning DMA on for the drive and use a software such as Tera copy…
Hope it works