Nomination for the worst technical support advice for 2011

Yesterday I installed my 1TB MyBook Elite and sucessfully performed a system backup.  No problems.  Today I booted the PC and after sucessfully filling in the password screen I encountered a BSOD.   Two additional reboots yielded identical results.  Rebooted with the MyBook  disconnected and the system came up clean.   Mystified, I called tech support and related to them the situation.  Their conclusion - unplug the MyBook from the power strip and plug it into a wall outlet because it is not receiving enough power.  C’mon WD, if it had enough power to install and do a 400GB backup it would stand to reason that it would be able to reboot.  I reqeusted clarification as to whether any plug would do or did it have to be on the north wall of the house.  They were unsure.

Ugh… That’s pretty bad…

willymac wrote:

Yesterday I installed my 1TB MyBook Elite and sucessfully performed a system backup.  No problems.  Today I booted the PC and after sucessfully filling in the password screen I encountered a BSOD.   Two additional reboots yielded identical results.  Rebooted with the MyBook  disconnected and the system came up clean.   Mystified, I called tech support and related to them the situation.  Their conclusion - unplug the MyBook from the power strip and plug it into a wall outlet because it is not receiving enough power.  C’mon WD, if it had enough power to install and do a 400GB backup it would stand to reason that it would be able to reboot.  I reqeusted clarification as to whether any plug would do or did it have to be on the north wall of the house.  They were unsure.

Did you try it?  Our external drives take more power to spin up than to run.  If there’s a power leak in the power strip, then the drive may not get enough power to boot up with the pc and cause a blue screen.  Therefore, plugging it directly into the wall allows us to eliminate your power strip as a problem.  Oh, and you don’t have to plug it into the north wall.  The south wall will do just fine.

1 Like