I am using a 1.5TB MyBook Elite. I’ve had it for about 3 months.
I let a friend transfer some files from my drive to his new external drive (a Seagate 1TB)…he kept the drive for a couple of days and gave it back and there were no problems.
He told me he had some files on his drive that I wanted, so I popped in and let him transfer those files and he returned the drive a short while later. When I plugged the MyBook back in, it took me a while to realize that my PC wasn’t recognizing the drive at all. Upon physical inspection, I noticed that the LED was blinking at a steady clip and that the exterior label showed the drive name, but not the capacity meter. I then noticed that the LED stopped blinking so I pulled up SmartWare and it showed the “No writable SmartWare partition found” message, and that the drive had no files on it, when in fact it was nearly half full!
I called customer service and they put me through the troubleshooting steps which consisted mainly of power cycling the drive 4 or 5 times and checking Device Manager to see if the PC was detecting the drive at all (it wasn’t). After that I was told that we had exhausted the troubleshooting steps (!) and that I had a defective drive.
I am at the end of my rope with trying to figure this out. The only thing I can come up with is that my friends drive is a FAT32 and mine is NTFS. The problem didn’t start until he transferred files from that drive to mine. Could this be the issue? More importantly, have I lost all that data?
Any help would be appreciated.