MyBookWorld Blue Rings (500GB) - intermittently unrecognised on network

Every now and then the device (MyBookWorld Blue Rings) seems to power up fine but is not discoverable on the network either via windows explorer or IE. Then it usually takes a lot of fiddling around to get it recognised (turning it off, the router off, the PC off, turning everything on etc). After the first half dozen times I became sick of the unreliability and decided to download the Data Lifeguard utility to check the drive. Interesting result - the drive is accessible through windows explorer as a mapped drive, but the utility does not see it - is there some trickery going on here?

DLG is designed for direct attached drives only- It isn’t designed to see network drives. Log into your Shared Storage Manager- the drive self-tests and provides a status in the upper right hand corner.

In regards to your issue, it sounds like your drive may be going - I would back up any vital data ASAP just in case.

If you haven’t already done so, upgrade the firmware on both the drive and the router. Also reset your router to factory defaults after the update. Try to keep everything on the network set to dynamically assigned IP addresses opposed to static. Make sure there is only one router and one DHCP server on the network. Change out the Ethernet cable to the drive and plug it in to a different Ethernet port. If the drive is plugged into a hub or switch, try plugging it directly into the router. Don’t use things like OpenDNS or NetworkMagic as they tend to cause network issues.