My Book Essential goes on and offline randomly

Portable Drives My Passport
1

I have a Western Digital My Book Essential, 1.81TB, that I use for backup on my former Windows 7 Pro Lenovo laptop, recently updated to Windows 10. Before I updated, the drive would go on and offline randomly, but since the update, it is even more frequent. I have a shortcut to it, and if I click on it, it comes up briefly, then quickly goes offline again. A minute or so later it comes back online, and as best as I can tell, stays online until I try to access it again, then pop! Needless to say, this makes backing up a challenge at times. This is fairly new behavior, I’ve only noticed it in the last 4-5 months or so (long before the Win10 upgrade). Is it just getting old? Something else?

Any ideas why this might be happening, and better, is there a fix? Let me know what other info would be helpful.

TIA
elaine

2

Hello,

Have you tried on another computer?

3

Unfortunately I don’t have another one to try it on.

4

I am still having this problem, and it plays havoc with my backups. Again, I don’t know if this is “normal”, or if there’s a problem with the external or my laptop. As noted, I do not have another machine to try it on, this is it.

Appreciate any assistance.

elaine