I bought my My Book Essential 3 TB, 1 1/2 months ago and it has been working fine until 2 nights ago. Now, I plug it in and it doesn’t show up as an accessable drive. I looked in devices and printers and it shows up there labled as My Book 1140. I look in device manager and it shows up there listed as WD Drive management Devices with a subcategory as WD SES Device. It does NOT show in disk management. The device is showing as working properly with the most up to date drivers, I even downloaded from the WD site and installed them that way, so yeah, up to date. I followed the FAQ and tried a new outlet, a new power cord, a new data cable. And yes, I can feel the disk moving. It’s obvious that my computer is recognizing it because when I unplug it, the My Book and WD Drive listings mentioned above go away. I just can’t access it. My husband insisted that it was my computer and I must have picked up a virus so I spent all evening reformating and reinstalling my operating system. Nope, didn’t fix the problem with my external. Any ideas? There is one large folder on my external that I do not want to lose. It is replacable but it would take weeks to reaccumulate all the files.
Seems that you have tried most of the required steps to check the drive.
You can also test the drive with a different computer.
Check the link bellow for more information:
WD external drive is not assigned a drive letter by Windows or Mac OSX and data on the drive is inaccessible
I was reading on here earlier today and saw a recomendation for a dlg test. I downloaded it and it identifies the drive, says that SMART status is unavailable and it has a capacity of 0.00 GB. After making sure my windows updates were up to date, which they weren’t since I was in a hurry when I wiped my interal hd, smartware is now identifying it but says no writeable partition found. And disk management is still not showing the drive.
I’ll give that link a shot and hope it helps. Thanks.
