Hello,
I bought a WD My Book 3TB 3 months ago. One month ago I switched to Mac for my personal use, so I reformatted the HDD from NTFS to HFS+.
Yesterday I was using transferring files onto the HDD when I got a notification stating that in future I should safely remove external USB devices so that I do not lose data. It then started making 3 subsequent sounds. The first is a buzzing sound, then some sort of shorter, higher pitched sound I associate with something being reset, then some sort of warning sound (??). The entire cycle of three sounds takes about 6 seconds. It makes these sounds for about 1-2 minutes then it’s quiet. It stops on the short, higher pitched sound. This occurs ever time I disconnect the power from the HDD, but not when I plug the HDD into another computer (while keeping the power connected).
I can see a light switching on and off rapidly inside the HDD for several minutes (even after the it stopeed making noise). Then the light’s on/off frequency becomes less (1 second on, 1 second off).
On my Mac the HDD does not show up in Disk Utility. When I connect it to a Windows PC (USB 2 only, do no have access to a USB3.0 Windows PC), it shows up in device manager, but not in my computer. The first time I plugged it into the Windows PC it showed an “Attention required” yellow triangle with an exclamation mark in it. It said that a driver could not be found.
Steps taken:
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I have used another USB 3 cable to connect it to my USB 3.0 port. No change in behaviour.
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I have connected it to 2 different wall sockets with 3 different adaptors on each socket. No change in behaviour.
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I have downloaded the Firmware updater for Mac. The installer could not find my harddrive.
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I downloaded the Firmware updater for Windows. The HDD was found, but the updater couldn’t update because there are other applications open. So I started Task Manager and closed all the non-critical processes I could close. Same error.
5.
Transporter1315s-MacBook-Pro:~ transporter1315$ system_profiler SPUSBDataType
USB:
USB 3.0 SuperSpeed Bus:
Host Controller Location: Built-in USB
Host Controller Driver: AppleUSBXHCI
PCI Device ID: 0x1e31
PCI Revision ID: 0x0004
PCI Vendor ID: 0x8086
Bus Number: 0x14
My Book 1140:
Product ID: 0x1140
Vendor ID: 0x1058 (Western Digital Technologies, Inc.)
Version: 10,16
Serial Number: 574D43315430363936393238
Speed: Up to 5 Gb/sec
Manufacturer: Western Digital
Location ID: 0x14a00000 / 2
Current Available (mA): 900
Current Required (mA): 2
So it picks up my HDD on the terminal only. I could not find another suitable power cable.
Is this a problem with the Harddrive itself or the enclosure?
I am running OS X 10.8.2 (2.6 GHz Core i7, 16GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM, 256GB SSD) on a 15.4" MacBook Pro Retina.
A speedy reply would be much appreciated.
Regards,
transporter1315