Device: My Book Essential (SmartWare)
Product#: WDBAAF0015HBK
Internal Device’s Drive: WDC WD15EADS-11P8B2
Issue:
The device was working flawlessly as I had over 500 Gigabytes of videos, music ect backed up on the drive. Then one day every file became a shortcut and yet the file size was still there.
My Attempts:
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Used WD Smartware CD application that came with the device to reformat. The format took forever to do as expected with a drive this size.
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result: Drive was VERY SLOW
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Took the hard drive out of the device thinking that the board between the hard drive and USB conection was going bad. Instaled it internaly with SATA connection then Reformated the drive with FAT32. Also downloaded the most updated driver for this hard drive
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Result: Drive shows up only on Device manager and in BIOS settings
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Used WD Align - I read that WD uses some kind of advanced formating and if the drive becomes misaligned it won’t work WD True image
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Result: Drive won’t show up in either of these utilities
View screenshots here: http://i49.tinypic.com/33l1irl.jpg
