I am having the same issue. I had restored the factory defaults on my WD MyBook Live and the smartware partiton was available. I had even performed a backup on my system drive. I also added a user name that was the same as an existing Windows 7 user name. But when I went back to view the retrieve options, the Smartware partition was not found.
I will attempt to remove the user from the WD MyBook Live configuration to see if the result is different.
Removing the user, with the same name as a windows 7 account, from WD MyBook Live user list did fix the problem. I am now able to see the SmartWare partition and all the items backed up. And I did have different passwords for each.
It seems odd that the two accounts or user-IDs should affect each that way.
I tried hard reset MBL and still have error. Don’t update SmartWare, because I have this error after update. I instaled older version from cd and works fine. New version have errors.
After working perfectly for 3 days I suddenly got this error. I tried different browsers and different addresses but nothing worked. In the end I rebooted the machine (I had to pull the power lead out and wait 3 minutes then reconnect the power) and after than my dashboard was visible again. I also then speeded up the dashboard by disabling twonky and itunes sharing, this has made it twice as fast to load and do stuff. No problems since, fingers crossed. Not too sure about updating either based on what I’ve read in this forum =)