I purchased a couple 1TB My Book Essentials several months ago from Best Buy and never got around to attempting to install them until just now. After downloading and running the firmware and management drivers, my 1 TB drive now shows that it only has about 400 MB space on it total and that it is full with no other space on the drive. I have no idea where to go from here. I attempted to look at the FAQ’s, but found nothing helpful there. For your info I am running Win7-64, with 8 GB RAM and a Q9550 2/quad 2.83 GHZ CPU. Could you help me out here? It’s no good having this drive if I can’t use it. I want to use this drive for backup purposes.
Sorry I didn’t have time to go into more detail before. Since you got the drives some time ago it probably has the older virtual CD that popups when you connect. Look in the DVD/CD Rom drives in the device manager. Did it prompt you to instal a SES driver? if so select Yes. You may have to look in the Disk Manager and see if the Drive is online. If not change it to online. See if that helps. Did you install the Smartware?
Thanks for the comment. When I first connected the drives yesterday Windows attempted to load drivers for the device, but could not find any, so I went to WD’s download site and downloaded the files that it had there for it and followed the directions for loading those up on the drive. I was unaware of the issues associated with the VCD that I read about on the forum, so I think that I did indeed install that program which I am truly sorry that I did since I plan to use Paragon software for backup purposes. But here is what I have found so far since reading your post. I went to device managed and found the drive listed as a VCD of the size that I mentioned yesterday. In checking in the properties box of the My Book in the device manager I found these listings:
USB Mass Storage Device that was listed as working properly
WD MyBook 1110 USB Device also listed as working properly
WD SES Device also listed as working properly
WD Virtual CD 1110 USB Device also listed as working properly
Now I also noted on the “Volumes” tab of the 1110 USB Devices a “Populate” button. Also on this tab all listed volume info spaces were blank as well as the capacity info. Can you give me any information that I maybe should know in those areas? Would the "Populate button be of value here? I don’t know if that is important here, but well… You also mentioned the “Disk Manager” I am lost here. How do I find the disk manager? Are you referring to a manager specifically for the My Book? I used my “PC Wizard” program and found that it is listed there with some 900+ GB’s space, but I found no indication that it is available to me.
I kind of assume by what you have said so far and what I have been discovering here today that the drive probably is available to me. I just don’t understand how to get there. Some times this computer stuff totally befuddles me. Other times I amaze myself with my understanding.
Anyway thanks again for your input I appreciate everything that you can help me with on this.
If you go into the device manager find the drive right click then properties then volume clicking populate will show some disk information it might help. To get into the disk manager go into control panel, administrative tools computer management, when that opens look on the left side and disk managemnet is there. Then look down to where the drives are shown as bars and see if it is online that’s on the left side. If not right click where it says disk 1 or whatever it is and change to online.
Thank you for your help. You’re a good teacher. Well I found my way into disk management and this is what I found and what I seem to be faced with.
Both the My Book and the WD Smartware are listed there.
Both are listed as “online”
The My Book does not have a volume name for it which I would expect since I never came to a place when I was installing the firmware that allowed for naming it that I can remember. That volume shows nothing under the “file system” column.
The WD Smartware list the file system as UDF.
I can find the WD Smartware listed in “Computer” under removable storage, though of course it is full and unusable in that way.
My book is not listed either in HD’s or removable drives.
But here is the interesting thing to me. If I launch WD Smartware the My Book is listed in the home page along with my internal “B” or “C” drive whichever I choose from the drop down button, but the My Book drive has the message “No writable WD Smartware partition found”. Within the icon of that drive.
If I click on the “Settings” tab and open that window which is the only other tab that is active I can click the “Set up software” button it looks as though I may to set up some parameters for back up using the smart drive software, but as I mentioned before I have no interest in using the WD backup software.
So here is what I did. I don’t know if this will overcome my issues with this drive of if I have completely mucked things up for good. I will check it out tomorrow, but I have other things to do for the moment.
In Disk management I setup and formatted the My Book drive in NTFS and it now shows up in "Computer and WD Smartware as a usable drive. I will let you know how I make out in a couple days.
The virtual CD you see can be hidden with the drive manager or what I did was simply go into device manager and disable it. I didn’t mess with the firmware updates. If you get the popup for SES drivers install them or it will popup every time it connects.
