When I connect two "My Book Essential" drives only 1 is recognized!

Hi all

I purchased a second "My Book Essential " external drive, but what a surprise windows7 only recognizes one drive wichever connects first!!, is it a bug?? or what do I have to do for be able to work with or explore both drives…

Within WD smartware application a message like “No WD smartware writing partition has been found” is shown for the second drive as you can see in the screen capture included in this post

In fact some other drawback I found is after finish upgrading from the web to the latest version the application and direct access to it disappear!!, what’s going on???

how all this can be solved??

PD: both drives are “My Book Essential” - 2 TB

The two drives are probably conflicting on drive letters. Take a look at the control panel>admin tools>disk management and see if the 2nd drive is detected, all you may need to do is assign it a drive letter.

Roamingjay wrote:

The two drives are probably conflicting on drive letters. Take a look at the control panel>admin tools>disk management and see if the 2nd drive is detected, all you may need to do is assign it a drive letter.

I’ll try this, but I’m not sure yet if this can be done because since they’re usb drives the operative system should assign a drive letter automatically in such way they do not enter in confllict with ohter exisiting drives or USB devices.

Sometimes windows goes screwy and tries to attach the drive to a letter that’s alread occupied. This is because Windows remembers which letter is associated to a drive and re-uses it each time.

Prime example is a USB stick I have, on one computer it’s happily recognised as P: another it tries to be P: but that is already assigned to a network drive. Therefore it fails to assign a drive letter and the drive doesn’t get recognised. By assigning it a new drive letter in disk management it was happy as could be :slight_smile:

it works!!

Besides to do what you said Roamingjay I had to explicitly activate/enable the drive because after changing drive letters the system was indicating  an error message like: “drive signature collision”

Thank you!!

I also am having this problem. I have changed the Drive Letter on both, one at a time, and the problem still persists. Both are new 2Tb My Books. I did not have this problem with 2 1Tb My Books.

Can you post a copy of the disk management window

I had to re-register…

See images below…

My Book (U) & test (U) are the two different 2Tb external drives.

Hmm can’t see the pics :frowning:

http://i1020.photobucket.com/albums/af324/Kinetic_the_Superhero/Capture-2.png

http://i1020.photobucket.com/albums/af324/Kinetic_the_Superhero/Capture2-1.png

http://i1020.photobucket.com/albums/af324/Kinetic_the_Superhero/Capture3.png

First off I’d disable all the Smartware virtual CDs This is under the Smartware Software in the Settings Tab > Setup Drive > Virtual CD. This’ll require a reboot. That’ll free up some drive letters for you! That might help. What’s converning me is the fact it states it is offline. Does the 2Tb drive work when it’s plugged in on its own? Try unplugging both of them, rebooting, then plugging in the 2Tb followed by the other drive? Any difference?

I have the same problem on my computer with two 1TB my book . I never use Smartware Software

hshokuhi wrote:

I have the same problem on my computer with two 1TB my book . I never use Smartware Software

Did you try re-assigning the drive letters in Disk Management, like what worked for the OP?

I’ve never encountered this problem… Win7 has no problems with my 2 MyBook Essentials 1TBs.  Bought one, and it worked… added another one a few months later and it showed up as soon as I plugged it in.