I have a 2 TB My Book Essential WDBACW0020HBK Drive that I had connected to a Netgear wndr 3700 router via USB and it functions as a NAS. I came home after a weekend away to find the device powered off (light off). I powered the unit on and went to my networked media devices where I saw the Readyshare folder but nothing in it. I figured maybe it was the router.
So I took the drive and connected it directly to a usb port on my laptop and powered it on, the drive did not show in windows explorer and this was not the first time that I directly connected the device. I tried a different USB port, tried going to device manager to see if there was an unrecognized device, tried unplugging and plugging the drive’s power. I then read an article that the USB cable is faulty, so I purchased a new one off of Amazon. That didn’t work either.
I was going to grab a USB enclosure and a Sata cable and try to open the My Book to directly connect to my laptop’s sata port. However, I have read that some of these drives will not allow you to do this because of encryption that require that they be connnected to a USB board. Is this true and what are my options? I would really like to get the data off of there.