My Book Studio powers up but not detected

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

I have a 2TB My Book Studio external drive. Today it is not detected - even in Disk Utility - via USB or Firewire. I have also tested on different computers (2 Mac’s, 1 Windows) and same result. Also tested with a different power supply.

When I plug the power in, I can’t detect any movement/action from the drive. But when firewire or USB cables are connected to a computer, then it spins up and makes “hard drive noises”. At no point do I observe the front LED flashing at all, although I never paid attention to it before the drive stopped working either.

I was just shocked to read that this drive may have “hardware encryption” meaning that I can’t even take the drive out of the casing and recover it elsewhere. Is that really the case?

Finally, what other steps could I try in order to get it working again?

2

I forgot to note that the two Macs I tried it with are running Mountain Lion and Lion respectively.

3

Hi, I would call tech support for help on this one.

4

I raised a ticket with the same questions but all they did was confirm an RMA (ignoring the questions). The data is really important so I’m trying to understand if it’s an enclosure problem or a HDD problem - hopefully the latter is easier to manually fix and retrieve data off. Are the WD tech support people more helpful by phone than they are by ticket?

5

I have the same problem cant find the disk anywhere some say i need to take out the hard drive and put it in a new shell. i have not tested it yet.