My Book keeps losing drive letter

I have been experiencing a weird problem as of late.  I have a My Book 1TB model number WDBAAF0010HBK-00.  Every time I restart my computer, the drive loses its drive letter.  I can see the UDF SmartWare, but no drive.  I can go under disk management and asign a new letter and it will work fine.  All my files are there and usable.  If I restart my computer, I have to reassign a drive letter again to get to the files.  If I connect the My Book to my laptop, it is the same deal.  Using windows 7 64 if that matters.  The drive was making my computer hang while booting about a week ago, so I updated its firmware using WD’s firmware utility (it ended up being legacy usb in the bios that was causing it to hang during boot, but that is besides the point).  Did the firmware utility screw this drive up?  It said it completed successfully. 

I would recommend you to scan the drive for errors and defragment it using the operating system utility. I would also recommend you as a last resort to save the data on this drive to another location and then reformat the drive. 

I have reformted the thing several times, but as a quick format and the normal format (took several hours).  Nothing.  When I try to run scandisk it never even starts and I get an error saying windows was unable to complete the disk check.

When I try to use SmartWare to do some type of diagnostic, it doesn’t even see the drive.  I get this error :No writable WD SmartWare partion found even though after assigning it a drive letter I can read and write just fine.

Just a litle follow up.  I ended up fixing this a little bit ago.  Silly me, I was using the most up to date version of SmartWare from WD’s website.  The most up to date version wasn’t seeing the My Book adn thus I could test it with the diagnostic tools included with SmartWare.  The older out of date SmartWare that comes preinstalled on the My Book DID see the drive.  Ran the three diagnostic tools that are included in that version of SmartWare and used SmartWare, NOT Windows, to format the drive and it fixed it.  It is keeping its drive letter after several reboots now and mounting just fine.  Weird and kinda dumb that the most up to date version of SmartWare wasn’t seeing the drive, but the older version did.  Whatever, it is fixed.

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Thanks for posting back on what you found. Maybe it will help somebody else.

Joe