Boy do I need help. Before I go to a ddata recovery place I would like some advice. My 1TB My Book is doing weird things. I’ve had it for a couple years and recently it stopped being recognized my the copmuter. I have to shut it down and restart it and that usually works. Now almost nothing. It shows up under the Safely Remove Hardware icon but not My Computer or Disk Management. I have done the following:
Plugged it directly into the wall outlet. Tried two different cables - one firewire and one USB. Rebooted the computer (lots of times). Listened for strange noises with and without the data cable.
The cool Knight Rider light on the front moves most of the time but sometimes stops and slowly blinks on and off. Today I got to back up some files but it stopped and I haven’t made it work since.
I am using XP on this machine. Reformatted the computer. Couldn’t get the MyBook drives to work. Similar to what you saw. I had reformatted the drives several years ago as NTFS. You need to go and download the software that came with your HD. WD has it on their website - use the registration info you used to get on this forum.
Once you download the software - and get it all. Turns out there is a driver that is installed when you attempt to install the software. So, don’t install anything but run the setup wizard - as if you were going to install their provided software. Uncheck everything and then exit. You will notice that a driver is installed and a small uitlity that shows up in the tool bar at the bottom.
I actually plugged my drive into my laptop and it worked but would not on my desktop - and that is where the original problem started. I was very worried b/c I have a TB worth of data. On the desktop the firewire and the USB were doing exactly what you described. I have a couple of external HD on my desktop and I think there was a driver conflict.
Once I faux ran their software (w/o actually installing anything) it came back to life, on the desktop.
Hope this helps - I can’t believe that the WD software doesn’t actually install anything ( on the face of it) but one runs a batch file in the backend and that seems to do the trick. Good luck
