I’ve had this for about a year now. I’m not using the WD software, just the drive itsself. It’s reformatted into 2 partitions and has been rock solid until today.
I went into it to play some music and it showed all my folders, but empty. The few bare files that weren’t in folders showed up normally. Ran a virus scan and it scanned the visible files but nothing in the “empty” folders. The drive showed about 3/4 full in My Computer. I turned off the computer, unplugged the drive and waited for a few minutes and then restarted. Now Windows is showing it with the drive letter I assigned it, but can’t access it to do anything with it.
I’m guessing the mbr got corrupted somehow or something? Are there any tools or command line programs to try to repair the file system, mbr or whatever it is that’s gotten corrupted?
There’s at least a terabyte of irreplacable information on the drive that I would really like to get off. Thanks in advance for any assistance you may be able to offer.
It sounds like a corruption problem. Something like TestDisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk or Recuva http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk. You might also try deleting the driver for the Essentials disconnect it and reboot computer and then reconnect the drive and that should load a fresh driver in case it was corrupt.
As it turns out, the NEC usb 3.0 card I had installed pulled a disappearing act. I plugged it into my laptop and after it hashed around for a minute or two it came back up. The card was always screwy until I updated the firmware and drivers from the old NEC ones to the newer Renais (sp?) ones and this is the first time it’s gone out since. Still strange that I could access the files in the root of the partition but the folders came up empty. Go figure.
I’ll just keep it on the pokey usb 2 ports until I can find a usb 3 card that’s reliable.
