Desktop is not picking up my WD MyBook external hardrive

I have been using my WD MyBook now for over a year and have had no problems with it at all. In December I tried to connect the device to a different PC and while the PC picked up that something was connected to the USB socket (i.e. the little symbol at the bottom right of the screen showed up), the hardrive is not listed under “My Computer” anymore as it was before.

It has not been used since but today I have tried to use it on a PC that it has been used on many times before, as I need to update the computer with files on the hardrive and again it is not “being seen” by the computer other than the symbol at the bottom of my screen which allows for safely disconnecting the device. This computer has previously not had a problem picking up the device at all.

The device has been used on both PCs and a MAC.

Please help me work out how to be able to access the data on my MyBook, as I have been backing up work, photos and music for months, from my every day laptop, which is just as well as it was stolen last week and now I need to put all of the data onto my desktop ASAP.

Thank you for your help.

Sarah

me too - how do I fix it?

I had the same thing happen to a  WD Mybook about a year ago and the talked to tech support extensively.  Basically, they said to throw it away.  Now it has happend to my other Mybook (and last).  However, I have had great luck loading Linux onto a couple of PC’s when the hard drives crashed.  Most of the time a hard drive crashes, it is due to Windows malfunctioning, not the hardware.  Simply get Linux OS onto a CD, boot from the CD, and you can recover files.  I think it may work with the Mybook as well.  Also, I bought a Maxtor external driverecently that also had a Linux recovery CD.  

So pretty much this thing is useless… have you guys tried copy pasting instead of running the program thats given with this thing to backup up files go into it manually? Im going to try that and not mess with the Limitations they give by controlling what you do and save