my pc was working fine with a 500 gb mybook as my f drive it always had that blue icon that said f: my book under it. now all the sudden it says just f: and when i click it, it says format now. it was working fine yesterday. tried system restore but said something along the lines that it wouldnt affect f: what happened how do i get it back to normal? i have tons of pics and music and stuff on f: already. has been working well for like a year. i did transfer pics to it through a lexmark printer. maybe that has something to do with it?
First, is it under warranty?
If so, then you might be able to have WD take a look at it so they can recover your data and look at your drive. If the drive is bad and they can recover your data, then they should be able to get you a new drive with your data on it.
At the moment, it sounds as though your drive is in a format unrecognizable to your pc. However, this could sound worse than it is.
Did you recently take your drive off the system without ejected it first?
Did you recently connect your drive to another device with a different operating system?
In the past, I had issues moving my drive between Vista and Xp. When I moved my passport back
to Vista, Vista wanted to reformat it, but XP read it just fine.
If that was the case, then move the drive back to the device that you moved it to and see if you can read the files from there. If it was another pc or mac, then you might want to do an immediate back up from there. So you can reformat your drive on your orginal machine and move your files back.
Since you said you did something with your printer, then you might want to make sure your printer is no longer using it.
Try disconnect any devices you have attached to your pc. Eject them if you can using the little eject or safe release icon usually in the bottom right tray.
If you drive doesn’t come back up immediately, then you might want to eject it as well. Then plug it back in after a minute or two into the same location it was plugged in before you had any issues. Meaning the same usb or firewire port.
Try restarting the pc and see if it picks up the device in the same port. Sometimes the drive is mapped to the usb or firewire port, which in your case could be the F: drive.
Worst case scenary, try using some sort of data rescue or recovery program out there.
Hope this helped.
Hi there,
WD does not cover data recovery under the warranty!
you need to try a different computer, there may be a conflict on this one, but if not the case then i’m affraid this is what is called data corruption.
Try right clicking on the drive in my computer, click properties, then tools and check now and check both boxes for error fixing.
If that does not work you may need to send the drive to a data recovery company, or try a data recovery software as the drive is beeing detected by your computer.
I bought a WD my book essential. I connected it properly and downloaded the drivers but when I try to save a pic or music on the drive it says that the drive has not been modified. I have a Mac running Mac OS X. If the drive is currently formatted for windows how do I format it for Mac?
open disk utility, choose your drive, select format as mac os extended (journal).
Thank You (svkrzn) for the solution to my problem. it has helped me format my WD essential from windows to Mac OS X. I have 2 questions before i create an unwanted issue. i hear people talk about moving the drive from different computers with different operating systems,hence causing it to loose files,crash ect… If I am only moving the WD essential external from a desktop Mac (OS X 10.4.11) to a MacBook (OS 10.5.8) will i create a problem within the drive.
Also Im thinking about installing windows 7 on my macbook (OS X 10.5.8) - will i have a problem transferring files from the windows partition to the Drive as well as transferring files from the Mac OS side. Thank You
No problems if you’re moving your drive from mac to mac.
If your drive is formatted as macos HFS (macos file system), your windows won’t be able to see/modify it unless you install a software like MacDrive. In other way you can format the drive as FAT32 so both macos and windows are able to see it and modify. You can also keep your drive as NTFS but you have to install macfuse + ntfs-3g on your macos so you can use this drive.
you seem to know alot about this, i got everything working and running but when i try to put files onto the wd drive it says the WD Smartware CANNot be modified? how do i make it modifiable ?
