My Book not visbile in explorer anymore, but still in device manager

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

I have a My Book Essential (the one with the green led). I use it on a win XP pc and I never had to instally any drivers because XP should just recognise it. XP always did regocnise it, until this week. I don’t see it anymore in explorer so I cannot access the harddisc, but when I go to device manager I do see the WDC disc there under disc drives.

I can hear the harddisc spinning, the led is burning. When I plug it out and in I dont get any alerts or anything, I’m not being asked about drivers

This happened after the last windows update but that could be coincidence.

What can I do?

2

Go to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management. Is it showing up ?  If it is , hover over the drive number in the Computer Management screen and right click. Select properties.

What does the status say ? If it is good, at the bottom of that pop up window is a Select usage selector. Is it set to Use (enabled) ? If not enable it. Probably not that simple though.

If it is already enabled and status says good you can try the troubleshooter tab on that propertes popup. you can also check you driver and roll it back or update through the driver tab.