Is My Book Essential ruined? Please help!

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

I have a My Book Essential 1TB External. I’m on Windows 7 x64. After I updated I’ve been getting a lot of bugs and extreme lag. I would click on the drive in My Computer, enter my HD password and the drive would open up with all my folders, etc. But then when I wanted to drag folders from my External onto my PC hard drive it would freeze up and automatically quit? Windows would no longer show the External as attached to my computer. No matter how many times I click on the icon in the task bar for WD SmartWare, it will never come back up. I have to restart my PC everytime so I can renter the External. I then installed all WD software from the Control Panel, didn’t change anything or help at all.

I have no clue what to do or what has happened, but my External HD is pretty much useless right now. I have very important files on there, I need to get access to this immediately.

Please help!

-Brett

EDIT: Now my PC has trouble recognizing the External. I tried it on my Laptop also, it doesn’t show anything. It shows up under disk management sometimes. For example it’ll show up then simply disappear.

Finally after restarting my PC a bunch of times and switching USB ports back and forth, this CD DRIVE E: icon appeared for the WD UNLOCKER. Whenever I try and double click on it to open it up, the green bar appears to load as seen below, then the icon just disappears, it will not open anything.

When the "CD Drive (E:) WD Unlocker appears like above, my external HD will briefly appear under DISK MANAGEMENT. It shows up then just goes away along with the E:\ drive icon. I don’t know if the USB cable that connects the External to my PC is bad or not? My external was working an hour before all this happened, so I don’t understand what is happening?

Also, when I click on “Devices and Printers”, an icon appears with “My Book 1130”. This is what is shows.

My External does light up when plugged into my PC and turns off when removed. I can hear a ticking sound which sounds like the HD working? All these problems seemed to start after I updated to WD SmartWare  1.5.1.6. I even unistalled all the WD software. For some reason whenever I try to install “WDSmartWare_Software_Upgrader_for_Windows_1.5.1.6” it just sits there and hangs, doesn’t do anything.

2

If the drive is still in warranty call customer service. It sounds like the firmware update is corrupt. You can try runninig it again but I doubt it will help. In the future I wouldn’t mess with the firmware updates unless I had a problem with the drive or Smartware. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Joe

3

in addition to what Joe says, I’d also consider two more things.  the clicking can mean that the drive is bad, but it can also mean that the drive is not getting enough power.  try connecting it directly the wall socket, and see if it spins up and stay online. 

the other thing is that with it going up and down, like that, the file system could have become corrupted.