Day before yesterday connected an old My Book Pro Edition II to a WD TV Live Streamer - worked absolutely fine.
The issue was that it was setup as Raid 1 so as I wanted it just as a secondary storage device for media I wanted to change to Raid 0 and use the full 1T capacity.
Last night downloaded the latest version of software etc and connected to my laptop using the same USB cable.
Again the device was recognised straight away and it allowed me to delete all the old data that had already been copied to my laptop and then use the drive manager.
I then selected Raid 0 from the manager and after a few seconds it flipped out of the manager and since then windows will not recognise the drive and the drive manager states “Device not Recognised.”
A red WD icon appears in widows and when you hover over it it gives the drive details and 0% full (or utilised) so there is some sort of connection.
I am not sure if I can sort this out or not. First, let me ask- when you mention “drive manager”, are you referring to the Windows Disk Management, or is this a Western Digital utility associated with the My Book Pro?
I just want to give you some initial response. I am not using my own computer at the moment, so I cannot access things like Disk Management. I will check back when I get home and see what I may be able to do.
thanks for both of your responses. To explain the time lag in the replies I am actually in the UAE so I am reading these messages first thing in the morning before I get stuck into work.
I have been using the WD Disk manager which is the the one reporting that the disk is not recognised but it only reported this after I tried to change the setup of the drive from Raid 1 to Raid 0 (as per Joe’s link) and at which point it the drive also disappeared from the windows file manager.
The progress I made last night was that I was able to reformat the drive through windows and the the drive became visible in the windows file manager but WD Disk manager still report back Disk not recognised and the capacity is only 460 - 480G.
At least now it is working.
Does this indicate that one of the drives has failed and if so is there any way of checking this?
My next step will be to remove both of the internal drives, clean every thing, especially connections, reseat all connections and see what happens. Probably will not try this till after the weekend so any advice in the meantime would be great.
I am not sure if I can sort this out or not. First, let me ask- when you mention “drive manager”, are you referring to the Windows Disk Management, or is this a Western Digital utility associated with the My Book Pro?
I just want to give you some initial response. I am not using my own computer at the moment, so I cannot access things like Disk Management. I will check back when I get home and see what I may be able to do.
Regards,
Kieren
You nailed it, old USB RAID drives from WD must be configured using particular WD drive manager program that lets you select the RAID type.
@OP sounds to me either one of the drives on the case or the case RAID controller failed, likely due to the age (Those drives are so old it has PATA/EIDE drives inside instead of SATA drives).
You shouldn’t have been able to even format one drive if one of the drives failed in raid 0. If the drives are okay, it’s possible that the drive defaulted back to the raid 1 array if the there was a miscommunication between the raid manager and the drive. Make sure to follow the kb posted above to switch the array to raid 0.
I have finally solved the problem but I think that it was a combination of faults.
As Bill said it was a communication fault but I think the fault has also corrupted WD Raid Manager on my home laptop.
On Friday morning (start of the weekend in the UAE) I removed each of the internal drives (one connection did feel loose, as if it was not pushed home properly,) cleaned the the contacts and reinstalled.
As soon as this was done and I reconnected to the laptop, the WD software responded differently. The Red WD icon (In Hidden Icons) showed that the drive was 58% utilised and was in Raid 1 (previously this Icon had recorded no statistics.)
However the My Book Raid Manager still reported back “Device not recognised” and therefore would not allow the raid setting to be changed.
This morning I have brought the drive to work. Installed the My Book Raid Manager on my office laptop, connected the drive and it works perfectly. I have reconfigured to Raid 0, formatted and as I write I am copying all my Movie files back on to a 1T drive.
I believe that the loose connection internal to the drive has in turn corrupted the My Book Raid Manager on my home laptop or at least inhibited its ability to connect properly with the drive.
Tonight I will remove all WD software from my home laptop and connect the drive to my WD TV live streamer which was the original plan. Can’t see any problem here as this has already worked last week although the drive was obviously operating as a Raid 1 drive.
So hopefully that’s it - Thanks for you inputs and help.
