My Book Essential (2TB) Issue

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

Hi everyone, I need some help with an issue I’m having with my external harddrive…

I bought the WD My Book Essential (2TB) approx. 2+ yrs ago.  I installed it on the PC that I had at that time.  Since then I’ve been using it on my new PC (1 yr old).  However I never formatted it to the new computer because I didn’t realize I had to, since then it’s been formatted to my new computer.  But I had to format it a different way because it was very laggy/slow, and it wouldn’t let me put things onto the drive itself.

When I say I did it a different way I had to go to the start menu, then right click manage, and then format it from there.  I followed instructions from the WD website in terms of partitions and whether to do NTSF, etc.  I chose not to do partitions because I didn’t want to so I have it using it’s full capacity.   I don’t currently have a lot on the driver; mainly some games, pictures, etc. Mostly media files.

Now the issue I’m having is this… Since it’s been up and running perfectly fine on my own computer, I wanted to bring it over to a friend’s to transfer some games and what not.  I was going to do it on a USB but my USB is just an 8GB and you can’t fit much on that.

I brought it over to his house and we plugged in the adapter and the USB cord into the USB port.  A couple of seconds go by and the Autorun pops up, HOWEVER it only pops up for the SmartWare.  When we go into that it knows what kind of drive there is but we have absolutely no access to it.  Even when we went into ‘My Computer’ the drive doesn’t show up, just his main computer drive.

We thought maybe we could just format it on his computer as well (I had duplicates of the files on my main harddrive so didn’t matter if they erase).  However it lagged so we ended up just getting fed up and leaving it.  Then when I came back home and plugged it back into my computer I had to go through the same process again: Start>right click ‘My Computer’>Manage…etc.

Now my driver is fine again, it’s working fine on my computer, but why can I not get it to work with his computer?  I know My Books are meant more for just a stationary extra external harddrive however I thought it would be recognized by other computers.  His computer and my computer are very similar as well so there’s no different operating system really.

To give you an idea:

I have an Alienware Aurora-R3, Windows 7 and he has a Dell XPS 8300 also with Windows 7.

Any help on getting his computer to recognize my external will be greatly appreciated.  Either that or I may invest in a larger capacity USB at this rate :(.

2

that drive should be recognized on both computers.  however, if you plug into a power strip, on the second pc, and it’s not getting enough power for the drive to spin up, then it might not show up on the other computer.  or, if it does show up in disk management, but you repartition it while it’s not getting enough power then, yeah, you wouldn’t see it when you take it back to your pc.  the partition would probably be corrupted.  next time try plugging the drive’s power directly into the wall on the friends pc, and see if shows up then.

3

Yeah for the power, at my own home I have it plugged into an outlet in the wall and we did the same at his place so not sure what my other options are.

Okay…so as I was replying I unplugged the power cord (while leaving the USB plugged into the PC), and I just replugged the power cord back into the wall outlet and now the driver isn’t showing up.  AutoPlay brings up SmartWare, but I wait for a long time and the other driver that I named ‘My Book’ (when I formatted it through ‘manage’ the first time) does not pop up at all when I go to Computer.  Then I go back to Start>right-click ‘computer’>‘manage’ and then it shows the drive without a given letter and it says it’s unallocated now.

So now what it looks like is that the HD itself will wipe the format every time I unplug it…

/wrists

4

it will wipe it out especially if you unplug it while or directly after copying data to the drive.  you should never unplug the drive before safely removing it from the pc.  that’s probably why it wouldn’t read the drive when you took it to your friend’s computer.  If you pulled the plug before safely removing the drive you were corrupting the file system.  never unplug the drive before safely removing it first.

5

so should it work then if I start removing it safely?

just tried…it doesn’t…guess i need to invest in a new one

would getting a WD passport be a better idea rather than a my book if I’m using it for multiple computers and transportation?

…I’m probably going to look into getting the external driver looked at at my local electronics store see if there’s some way of fixing this issue

6

if you’re using the safe removal utility that shows up in the system tray whenever you connect an external drive to your computer, then you shouldn’t have any problem with the drive getting corrupted.  if the drive is still getting corrupted, then you have another problem - possibly a bad usb cable, power adapter, or bad port, either on the drive itself or on the computer. 

I do recommend getting a portable drive if you’re going to carry the drive with you all the time.  just keep in mind that some computer usb ports may not put out enough power to run the drive.  I’d invest in a power booster cable (otherwise known as a vampire cable) for extra power.  also, I have a 1 tb elements portable drive.  I love it.  it’s just a bit bucket.  no extra software or encryption to worry about.