My Book Essential 2TB 3.0 no auto power up on boot

I am using the My Book Essential 2TB 3.0 on a toshiba notebook running xp pro on a usb 2.0 port

I have the WD smart ware installed but the drive is not password protected & no backup software is set up because it is being used as an active storage drive for my network.

The drive its self works fine except for when I turn the pc off at night then boot up again the next morning the electronics in the enclosure do not appear to turn on when receiving a wake up signal during the boot process as no lights are on and pushing or holding the power button does not turn it on, I can however hear the drive spinning.

I have the sleep timer disabled through the WD smart ware program but it makes no difference, the only solution appears to be to un plug the power for a few seconds then re connect & the drive will power up & recognize by windows but it wil not become a shared drive with network access until I reboot the host PC.

I have 3 other external drives connected of different brands & all are left always connected & powered on, they all spin down when the pc is off  fo a long period of time & all wake up properly on boot except for the My Book Essential.

Does anyone know if there is a solution for this or is it a hardware problem I am stuck with ?

Thanks, Joe

You might want to try a firmware and Bios update.

Some users have been able to get this resolved after they updated the computer Bios and drive firmware.

I will never buy another WD product again, I ran a scan on my drive & foud bad sectors (I probably shoud have done that first before I started using the drive) so I was able to recover most of what I put on it, mainly just movies but I did loose my last system backup which was made after two day of registry tweaks after a fresh OS install.

So I sent in the drive for a replacement  (for them to send the new drive out first they want to charge my credit card full blown retail + heavy profit for the security deposit on the new drive for a month which was almost twice what I paid for the drive @ staples on sale, a reasonable expectation would be to charge U manufacturers cost $40. to $60. for a deposit ) so I opted to send my drive in first, about 2 weeks later (yesterday) I get the new drive & the first thing I notice is this drive vibrates the desk & makes a low frequency drone noise that can be heard across the room, so now dumping off seconds drives that are not properly balanced @ manufacturing, this is not accepable if the first one had sounded like that I would have taken it back & bought another brand but I am stuck now

Then when I power up for the first time of the day I have the same failure to power up & properly mount the drive during boot.

I press the power button on the Toshiba Qosmio F-60 note book pc the WD enclosure wakes up with a solid light for a few seconds then bilnks for a few seconds, the drive spins up then the enclosure goes back to sleep before the pc has finished booting, the only way to get it to work is to un plug then re plug the power adapter cord then it will detect & mount ok then you need to reboot the system for it to properly mount with network shares.

I think my only solution is to buy another enclosure & put the drive in it, not something I should have to foot  the bill for to make it right,.

No quality control combined with poor customer support, I put more trust in an easy bake oven than a Western Digital product manufactured today.