My Book Home creates problem when PC wakes up from sleep & hibernation

Whenever my WD external drive is “mounted” onto my PC (i.e. I can access the drive from My Computer), and I put my PC to hibernate or sleep; after the PC resumes, I typically suffer one of the following:

  1. The drive takes 30 seconds (in case of wake up from sleep) or 1 minute (in case of wakeup from hibernate) to remount. The WD icon for the drive blinks several times for at least another 2 minutes (at max continuously) after remount and right clicking it does not show the normal list of commands including “Safely remove WD My Book 1394 HDD [G]:”. During this period of post-WD-drive-mount instability, there is difficulty in accessing the drive and its contents by double clicking on the drive or its content from My Computer, since each double click command takes about 10 seconds for the drive to respond.

  2. The mouse becomes totally unresponsive, which is fixable by putting the PC to sleep and then waking it up (only happens in case of wakeup from sleep).

  3. Blue screen error (only happens in case of wakeup from hibernate).

The only way I have to avoid this is that before I put the PC to sleep or hibernate, I right click on the drive’s system tray icon (or drive icon in My Computer) to safely remove the drive.

Once the drive is unmounted (although still physically connected), it does not create a problem with my PC’s sleep, hibernate and resume.

However, this method defeats the purpose of sleep and hibernation.

Kindly help resolve.

Regards,

OA

Drive: WD My Book Home Edition WD5000H1CS-00 (connected via FireWire)

My current PC configuration is:

PC: HP Compaq dx7500 Microtower

RAM: Corsair 4 GB

Graphics card: Zotac GeForce GTS 250 ZT-20105-10P

OS: Win Vista SP2 32 bit

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E7600

Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional Series

Windows Media Player v11.0.6002.18311

Hi Omar,

Whats the error code from the blue screen?

Dear Rich, Thanks for your reply. I’ve just added more information to my original post to help diagnose the problem since there is more than one symptom. Please note that since your post, I have been unable to replicate a blue screen, since it happens at random. However, I do recall the screen refer to a WD related *.dll file. Will confirm when I get another blue screen. Meanwhile, I’ve mentioned the additional symptoms in my original post.

Any ideas anyone?

Hi Omar,

Sorry for not replying sooner.

It sounds like the PC is trying to access the drive while Windows is waking up.

Did a bit of research - Do you have WD apps on the drive - Try moving them off the drive and see if that helps

I have had my My Book Home Edition 2 TB for several years, and it worked okay when connected to my linux server.

I stopped using it a while back though because I upgraded the drives on that server.

I recently wanted to start using it with my Alienware laptop as a games hard drive.  Hence, I also wanted to connect it via the eSata port.

It works, but as described by the original poster, I have trouble when resuming from sleep.  The behavior I see is that the computer comes back up, but the moment I try to click on anything, the entire OS freezes.  Even CTRL-ALT-DEL doesn’t work and after a minute or so, Windows pops up a dialog saying that it couldn’t handle the CAD event and to try rebooting the computer using the power switch.

Note that this only happens if the computer has been asleep for at least 10 minutes.

The most frustrating part is that it appears there was a firmware fix to the WD My Book Home to fix this, Firmware 1.034, but WD has botched up their website and it isn’t available anymore.

Now, they only offer their Universal Firmware Updater, but it doesn’t recognize this drive. I suspect because it is too old of a drive.

I looked all over the internet for a copy of the WD_MB_Home_1034_1_03.zip, but couldn’t find it.  The closest I got was from a site called driver guide dot com, but they had ten pages of attempts to install drive-by crud and when I actually got a zip file, it didn’t contain the firmware but rather some ad-ware. :confused:

I’m guessing we will be out of luck with these older drives unless someone happens to have the old firmware zip, *and* it is compatible with Windows 7 or 8 or some recent variant of Mac.

Hi Rich,

The drive did come with WD programs on it and they are still there.

However, moving them off of the drive did not help.

Any other suggestions?

Regards

Further ideas anyone?