Older My Book not recognized by computer

This may be a couple of problems together.  I have an older My Book WD5000H1CS-00.  My computer doesn’t read it::  When I go to the Computer screen, it no longer shows up.  When I have the computer booted up and plug the USB into the external, the blue light moves slowly but then lights up fully and stops moving.  Further, if I have the external plugged in when I turn the computer on, bootup stops at the black-screen pw prompt.  When I disconnect the external, Windows boots up as normal.  Finally, I’m getting a blinking WD in my icon bar at the bottom of my computer and when I hover over it, I get 0% used.  

It worked great until the winter.  Since then I have done these things:

  • Used 5 different USB cables
  • Downloaded the driver manager from the WD site twice
  • Plugged and unplugged and plugged it in a few dozen different occasions.

This might be a problem with a full drive–I was loading video from my camera to this device and walked away…and came back and discovered I’d about filled up the device’s hard drive.  So it may just be too full.  If so, is there a way to recover the files off the drive?  And who knows, the problem with the boot-up may be because the BIOS got changed (not by me, and nobody else uses this computer, would it do this spontaneously?)

What OS are you using? Does the drive show in Device Manager or in Disk Management?

Joe

The Device Manager says the device is working properly.