No lights and no desktop icon

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

Hello

weird thing happens this morning when i turned my mac on.

i noticed that there wasnt a mybook icon on the desktop

and that there was no light on my external drive.

i picked it up to check the wires and connections.

evertthings seemed ok.

and changed the firewire port around

and changed the plug.

i can feel that power is going in to the drive

but there is no light and no icon on my desktop.

i’m trying to stay calm since this has a backup of all my work on it.

the drive i have is a mybook home 500gb

and i am running a mac pro 2 x 2.8ghz quad-core xeon with Mac OsX 10.5.8

thank you for the help in advance.

2

So, you’re feeling the drive vibrate as it runs?  Have you tried the drive on another pc to see if it shows up?

3

I have the same issue withthis drive. is it a factory defect? as I am seeing many others posting this problem  with the drive suddenly not showing up.

 the light on mine does come on but the on/off switch is not responding . I need to unplug it to get it to turn off . the light stays on when connected through the firewire cable to my mac Pro tower.

4

If you unplug the drive, you also need to unplug the USB cable.  Otherwise, it will still not show up.  Mac’s provide power through their ports, so having it connected to the Mac could cause the light to show up without it being plugged into an outlet.  But it still won’t show up, until you power it up and then connect it to the computer.  So, try that. 

1 Like
5

I was panicking, my icon had just disappeared yesterday on my 2TB, 3 week old My Book. I was just unplugging the USB thinking it had to have been something I had done with my Mac, because I have had three My Books and this has never happened to me before. Because the light was on, on the My Book, I just assumed not to mess with the electrical outlet. Reading the last post, I unplugged it from the computer again, and then unplugged it from the outlet. When I plugged everything back in, it is there. THANK YOU

6

You’re welcome.