My MyBook Essential was on sale for half price, so I bought two. Then,
-
My desktop couldn:t recognize either drive. Why? Who knows?
-
So I tried with a laptop, and no problem. I already had a backup drive for the laptop, but I guess I can go to the extra trouble of copying over and switching hard disks with the desktop.
-
Then, the software on the CD wouldn’t install, so I download from the website, and that does install. Why?
-
But it installs in a foreign language! I didn’t know SmartWare was a Japanese only program. Why? Anyone’s guess…
-
Then it recommends that I update the software, so I download the updater, but it won’t install. The installer starts up, then just aborts without even an error message.
-
So maybe it is the firmware. Downloaded the firmware updater, and it won’t run either.
-
But, now the computer boot time has slowed to a crawl. No, no malware. Checked that. But, at least I can see the drive in Windows Explorer now.
-
But the “Setup drives” button is grayed out. So, I can’t set up my drives.
-
The “Backup” and “Retreive” buttons are also grayed out. So the ironically named “SmartWare” is essentially worse than useless. It does nothing, but is a drag on system resources.
-
The Smartware icon in the upper left of the screen is supposed to do something, but it doesn’t do anything either.
I looked around this board, and tried numerous of the suggested solutions offered by users, but nothing works. And I see almost no posts by WD staffers. Well, I guess this was why the drives were on sale for half price. Time to stop wasting time here hoping for fixes.
