The one grace I give WD is that this was one of the very first drives in the market place this large without costing too much, but seriously when a hard-drive company is selling BETA products, and when a hard-drive company is getting kick-backs to send customers to data-recovery-partners… I just think to myself, wow how can they not realize how transparently bad this looks… Once a tech company loses the engineers to pad the pockets of management, it’s future is guaranteed and you better start selling stock before it evaporates behind corporate termination clauses.
Holy flying GPL balloon, there are thousands of posts about problems with this drive… and so far I haven’t seen any solutions… more and more it is looking like a hardware error maybe in the controller…
I think I am going to be sick! I just bought a 2TB My Book and almost filled it with my photos from my world travels, family videos etc. that I have had stored on three external devices… This material is irreplaceable. It’s a lifetime of documents and photos of places I will never be able to get back to in my life… I came in this morning and I get ‘Delayed Write Failed’ pop ups every five minutes… in the process of trying to troubleshoot, it disappears. I still cannot get it to be seen.
The only solutions that I have seen posted here, other then by knowledgeable customers, say to try a power supply or USB cable other then the one that CAME WITH the drive. Geez, every time I’ve bought a car it came with wheels and an engine.
After seeing how long this and other threads have been around, I’m going to do everything I can to dump my data back to my old drives and get my money back. What a pain.
Buyers… Beware!
I am also a victim of WD. I brought a Passport 320GB for I don’t remember $80 bucks? It worked well for a few months (I rarely used it). I could also transfer files to my other computers. Then all of a sudden, it stopped working period. It didn’t fall or whatsoever. It just died for no reason. I know LOTS OF PEOPLE have the same problem and I have been trying every solutions suggested - but no luck. Well I guess WD just doesn’t care/make sure if their products are functional as long as there are people buying them. When I read WD Staff’s comments here, I was expecting a solution, but instead, he just says there is none. Basically you just have to ■■■■ it up with their bad. I don’t even want to bother writing emails to them now since it would be a waste of time.
Can anyone suggest me a more reliable external HD brand?
I bought the My Book Essential a few months back, thinking it would be a good way for me to backup all my files into a single place instead of on the laptop or other external drives. There is more than 300GB worth of data in there.
When I tried to access one of the folder, it prompts me to format the disk. Can anyone help me out on this? Without my having to format the disk, or at least recover the data in that folder.
This happened to me on Friday (8/20/2010)
After 2 day work, I covered it back. 
I contribute what I did and hope this can help other people.
- get a R-Studiio
(not the demo version, you need to have all fuctions.)
- scan sectors
(before you buy R-Studio, you can use demo version to make sure your “My Book” is still readable.)
- mark folders you want to recover and save them.
(I marked all good folders and ignored all bad folders.)
- reformat “My Book”
(after reformat it, it runs well)
- copy the good folders back to “My Book”
painful lessons
“My Book” has lifespan, it dies. everyone needs 2 “My Book” to mirror each other.
(one dies, reformat it then copy data from another mirrored one.)
The is a familiar theme:
My computer suffered a career ending injury. Some file config/sys file or something got corrupted or whatever. So I bit the dust and did a Windows XP reinstall, which is like a 16 hour process. Anyway, once I got the software up and running, the computer will no longer find the external hard drive. Which one? Who knows it is not written on the device anywhere. Huh? But I serial number is WD5000H032.
The computer will not find it on a new hardware search. Rebooting and turning the drive off/on doesn’t solve it. There are no drivers to download. So what is the problem?
The UBS flash drive port registers as new hardware found in seconds. I haven’t tried the external drive in a USB port because it needs some special cord that apparently costs more money than it should judging from previous emails.
FOLLOW UP
I was able to get the drive recognized by plugging it into a USB port. It showed up under disc drives in Device Management. However, I could not access the drive in My Computer. I tried updating the device driver, but there does not seem to be one for the My Book Premium ES edition. I tried uninstalling the device driver and installing it again. No luck. No surprise there.
I plugged the external drive back into the eSATA connector (which worked last week before the reinstall) and rebooted with no luck. Not recognized.
Ideas?
I’d just like to thank all the community members who have posted in this topic and in he next one (“My Book Essentials not backing up”) for saving me considerable money & a ton of aggravation. I have just decided to buy my first external drive, and decided to go for the 2TB size so I could store data from all 4 computers on my home network. I found this board while researching what would be the most reliable drive. I’ve been around since DOS 2.0 was the OS of choice, and back then Western Digital was the best drive manufacturer around; I can recall getting a free replacement for a 4-year-old drive that suffered a head crash. Naturally I was expecting WD’s My Book to be my ultimate choice. After reading all these posts, I’ll be looking at Seagate for a solution. Or maybe I’ll just stick to backing up to DVDs.
Jeremy, you have my utmost sympathy. I’ve spent decades in tech support, and I know how painful it is to swamped with user complaints when you have no solutions to offer.
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