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?
