Hi Guys.
This is sort of confusing. If anyone can give me reliable advice, I would be forever grateful.
I am using a macbook computer running 10.4 OS.
I have owned a 2TB My Book Mirror edition since early 2008. Last month, the mini USB connection in the back of this external HD broke, but my physical drives themselves were not corrupted and still very usable. My warranty had expired so I went through this WDC and found that my best bet would be to buy a refurbished ‘exact same model’ hard drive. I found this from an online reseller. When I received my new refurb, I loaded in my pre-existing drives and I was delighted to see this new enclosure running them without any problems. I was able to see my movies, listen to my music files, and load photos the way my original external hard drive from 2008 would. I was thrilled, but I just had to press my luck.
I figured, “well now I have an extra two blank 1TB drives laying here without an enclosure.” I decided I was going to put some of my data onto these new drives. I put them back into this new enclosure I received with the refurbished 2TB external and my computer was able to differenciate between the first My Book set of 1 TB drives (with all my data) and the new drives (without any data). I was really excited about this so I decided to try to utilize my 4TB hard drives (even though they are running out of an enclosure that only held two at once). I stayed up all night trying to organize my files and putting my oldest and least seldom used data onto my drives I would not keep in the external enclosure.
Fast forward to today,
The labels for my Hard Drive icons were ‘My Book 1’ and ‘My Book 2.’ I was thrilled I had conquered this mess. Although it was inconvenient to physically remove the drives to get from one to the other. I was convinced I was going to figure out a way to buy a Western Digital 4 TB external or build my own 6 TB external hard drive with a 3rd party enclosure so I can just keep adding files and load all the data to a single external I can use to reduce all this clutter.
BUUUUT…
Plugging in my original two 1TB drives today produced an error message on my Macbook. It stated that the files were unreadable and gave me 3 options. I think they were: Ignore, Eject, or run disk utility.
I called Western Digital and they said it sounded like failure of the drives. It just seems fishy to me that they were working for a couple days fine, then all the sudden it craps out on me. Has anyone had similar situation? I just want some tips, advice, recommendations. Do I take this thing to the Geek Squad like Western Digital tech support is recommending? I don’t think that’s a great idea, but I need this data badly. I think it’s either the drives went bad magically in the night or maybe I was toying around with the settings and the RAID settings were different between MyBook 1 and MyBook 2 so maybe that sent it into a tailspin? Would resetting my refurbished HD with the two new(er) drives inside to factory settings maybe help me? How do I even do that?
God I’m drowning here… Please help.
