Drive Discovery Problem

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

I just bought a 3TB My Book yesterday.  I’m running Windows Vista.

After the install, “Quick View” flashes continuously “Drive Discovering”.  It knows there is a locked My Book USB HDD temperature “OK” and 0% used (I think I have a few percent used).

Yesterday I set the password and everything was apparently happy, but the drive did not lock.  I reset a couple of times, re-set the password a couple of times, and it still wouldn’t lock.

Today on about the 4th password reset, the drive finally locked.  Now I can’t get it unlocked.  I keep getting “invalid password”

I’m 100% on the password I was attempting to enter.  It’s possible that I could have made a typing mistake.  I’ve tried every typing error I can think of, but still can’t get it unlocked.

I’ve uninstalled and updated the SES driver and SmartWare.  I can’t get to the firmware without unlocking the drive.

I strongly suspect the problem is in the configuration (hence the flashing QuickView and the inability to start via Auto-Run).  So if I could somehow get it configured correctly the password would work.

Any ideas on what to do?

2

Make sure you try any of the passwords you know

it has happen to all of us that we keep trying one of the many passwords we use to find out it was not that one

check if there’s a password hint 

3

Like I said, I’m 100% on the password I was trying to enter.  The only question is whether I made a typo.  I don’t think so, as I would have had to make the same typo in the password confirmation.

I think the problem is that the drive and the SW are not communicating properly.  The drive didn’t seem to lock through a number of password settings and reboots / power-downs.  Now the correct password doesn’t seem to unlock.

4

How about if I ask this way …

Anyone know how to make Quick View stop blinking in my notification area?

5

OK I finally broke down and erased the disk.  Mind you I lost a lot of important data in the process.

I reset the password … this time I typed the password and copied and pasted it into the password and verify password fields.

I then unplugged the drive and plugged it back in … voila … locked drive.  But when I re-pasted the password in again … “invalid password”.

So … broken drive / bad SW / whatever.  The thing doesn’t work right.