WD My Book Essential, 2TB, 1.008 Firmware, SmartWare 1.4.1.1
Running Windows 7 Professional, 32-Bit.
Drive is recognized, and works fine. I used it to back up my son’s laptop when upgrading him to a new one. Now I want to remove his data from my drive. Since there’s nothing of mine on it, I want to just wipe it clean and start with a fresh drive, just like it was when I bought it a couple weeks ago.
One problem. when I try running drive erase via the WD SmartWare app, I get the very vague and frustrating error:
“There has been an error erasing your drive.”
That’s it, no explanation, it just fails. I’ve rebooted, and everything else I can think of, but nothing gets beyond the error. If I try running WDQuickFormatter.exe from the drive directly, I get this error:
“Your WD external drive is in use. Please close all open applications and try again.”
The WDSmartWare app isn’t running when I tried running the formatter from the drive directly, and I checked running processes and there’s nothing WD related running .
I’m completely out of ideas on what to try now… Any help out there?