My Book 2TB USB3 drive becoming inaccessible when used with Norton Ghost

I have been using  a My Book Essential USB 3 2 TB HDD as the backup medium for Norton Ghost 15 for over 6 months  I have been doing scheduled drive and folder backups with no problems until a week ago when backups started to fail. When I started to investigate using manual backups I found that, while small folder backups (100 MB) still worked, with larger backups the backup was stopping after a few GB and after that I found that the My Book hard drive was misbehaving. The drive showed folders with no contents in explorer, and then it disappeared from explorer and device manager altogether and could not be accessed. Rebooting the PC did not unlock it nor did did disconnecting and reconnecting the USB cable - the PC did not notice that. The only solution was to cycle the power to the drive - then it reappeared in explorer and behaved normally - until I tried to read or write to it using Ghost when the problem reappeared.

I can use Ghost to do large file and folder backups (100 GB) to another external drive. Also I can transfer large folders (13 GB) back and forth between the My Book hard drive and the PC, using the normal Windows file copy, with no problem. I am thus not sure where the problem lies.

I am running Vista Home premium SP2. I have WD smartware installed and before the problem started I was using it for continuous backups of certain folders. I have now turned that off. The My book is not password protected (although is was before the problem started)

Any suggestions? I find it difficult to see how Norton Ghost could put the My Book into a state where it cannot be seen by Windows.

Have you try using another backup software such as Windows Backup. Also if you connect the drive into another computer do you encounter the same issue? How about reinstalling the software?

Thanks for the suggestions. I did a backup with Windows backup last night OK (except very slow - 10h for 85 GB). I had already reinstalled Norton Ghost.  I will try installing Norton Ghost on another PC but it will only be a USB 2 connection.

I have now tried installing Ghost on another PC and succeeded in doing a full disk backup to the My Book. However there are differences between this system and the system I had problems on: (1) this new PC runs XP, (2) I am using a USB2 connection, (3) I did not allow the installation of the SES driver when I attached the My Book drive - i.e. I am using the Windows generic driver. Don’t know if any of this makes a difference.