Can not see My Book Premium drive on Vista or XP

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

I got a My Book Premium drive that I can’t see in Windows Vista 64-bit or in Windows XP Professional SP2.  I plug in the power cord, and when I plug in the USB cable to the computer it powers up (the front light comes on and I can hear it), but it doesn’t show up under My Computer.

I downloaded and installed the “My Book Premium Edition Software (Including WD Backup)”.

I ran the “WD Diagnostics” utility on both XP and Vista, but it did not see the external drive, only my local computer hard drive.

I ran “My Computer : Manage : Storage : Disk Management” on both XP and Vista, but did not see the drive.

I ran NirSoft’s USBDeview that shows all connected USB devices, and it is not in the list.

On the WD Support site, it says that Windows XP and Windows Vista require additional drivers, and  when I go to the Downloads page, the only drivers listed are the Windows 98SE driver and the FireWire driver, so I understand this to mean that no additional driver is necessary for XP or Vista.

My friend used this drive for a long time successfully making backups of her Windows XP laptop.  After she plugged it into a Windows 7 machine, she can’t see any of her backups on the drive.  So now I’m hooking it up to my machines to see if I can see anything on it.

I’m suspecting that the drive is faulty.  I’m thinking about getting a Firewire cable and card to see if that works.  Is it possible that the USB is faulty but the Firewire may still work?

Western Digital My Book Premium Edition hard drive

Model: WD5000D032-000
Size: 500 Gig
Support website: link

Any help will be appreciated – thank you!

2

I got a firewire cable and plugged it in to my Vista machine.  It instantly saw the new device and put up a window with “Found New Hardware.  Windows needs to install driver software for your WD External HDD Button & Lights.”  I selected options to search for a driver, but it couldn’t find one.

I installed the “WD My Book Pro, Pro II, Premium, and Premium II FireWire driver”, but no success.  This driver is for Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP/Vista 32-bit.  But my Vista is 64-bit, so that probably explains why it didn’t work.

The drive now shows up in Device Manager as “WD External HDD Device IEEE 1394 SBP2 Device” with the Device Status:

This device cannot start. (Code 10)

Click 'Check for solutions' to send data about this device to Microsoft and to see if there is a solution available.

Any ideas?

3

I just came across this page on the Windows Vista Compatibility Center which says the My Book Premium Edition WDG1C5000 is compatible with Windows Vista 64-bit with no action required.