I have had this 8 TB My Book for a few years now. I am using Windows 11 Home edition. I came back from a 12 day vacation and it was not working. (Thought I shut it down, but I guess not). When I plug it in it makes the noise indicating that a device has been connected to the computer, but it does not show up as a new folder in My Computer. When plugged in, it does show up in Disk Management as “WD My Book 25EE USB Device” and “WD SES Device.” It says all the drivers are up to date. I checked for updates and none were found. I tried plugging the drive into the other USB ports on my computer as well as another laptop I own to no avail. Is there a fix for this? If not, what are other methods I can use to access and recover the data on my drive?
Check Disk Management and see if the drive is healthy but missing a drive letter or marked Offline. If it has no letter Windows will not show it in File Explorer, and assigning one usually fixes it instantly. If it is already online and still only shows as a USB device, that usually means the My Book enclosure or power supply failed while you were away, not the drive itself. Because these drives use hardware encryption, the safest way to access the data at that point is with proper recovery tools like Stellar Data Recovery rather than opening the enclosure and risking permanent data loss.
Thank you, I will try that recovery tool. Here is what it looks like in disk management. The Spanish for Disc 2 says unknown, uninitialized, and unassigned.
Can you retrieve the SMART attributes? If not, then the HDD is most likely dead.
https://ww.reddit.com/r/datarecoverysoftware/wiki/index/smart/
Encryption will only be a problem after you remove the drive from the enclosure. When the drive is inside its enclosure, the data are automatically decrypted.
Hello,
i am facing the same problem.
i bought it last month and this month it stopped working.
they asking me to approach authorised vendor for data recovery but they are charging more than the hard disk cost.
simply not accepted such quality by WD.
anyways, what finally you did & did you recover your data?
If you are comfortable opening the case you can take the internal drive out and connect it to a PC using a SATA to USB adapter or a desktop SATA port and see if it shows up in Disk Management. If it appears but files are not accessible you can try a software level recovery which is far cheaper than a lab. Recovery tools like Stellar Data Recovery can scan the drive and often pull files back if the disk is still readable. Also check WD warranty and start an RMA for the hardware replacement even though they will not recover data. This at least gets you a new drive while you focus on recovering the files from the old one.
Your 8TB WD My Book is being detected by Windows, but since it’s not showing up in File Explorer, the system is seeing the enclosure but not properly accessing the actual drive. This usually comes down to a corrupted partition, missing drive letter, or a problem with the drive or the USB bridge inside the enclosure. Check Disk Management to see how the space is listed—if it shows as unallocated or RAW, don’t format it, as your data is likely still there and can be recovered using tools like GetDataBack or R-Studio. If the drive shows 0 bytes, freezes, or acts unresponsive, it’s more likely a hardware issue. You can try a different cable, but if that doesn’t help, the problem could be the enclosure or the drive itself. Also keep in mind these WD enclosures sometimes use hardware encryption, so removing the drive may not let you access the data without the original board. If the drive has physically failed, your best option at that point is a professional recovery service.
