I have been using a My Book Essential 500GB USB 2 drive for 5 years so when I upgraded my PC I thought it would be good to get a bigger faster external drive. I bought a My Book Essential 1TB USB 3 partly because I had been pleased with my old drive but also because it came with SmartWare.
However, SmartWare not only didn’t recognise my old drive but has made it inaccessible in Windows. It is reported as a generic drive with no files, even though it has lots of files on it, and it can’t be formatted. Fortunately I tried it on a friends PC and it was reported as a My Book drive and I was able to copy my files to another external drive.
Why would a company write software that prevents its older drives from working?
As you pointed out my last paragraph was misleading, the drive does work on another PC but it does not work on my PC since I installed SmartWare.
I can accept that SmartWare does not recognise it as a My Book drive because it’s what you call a Legacy drive (although it’s only 5 years old) but what I can’t accept is that on my PC it is not accessible - it is reported as an empty (it’s not) generic drive that can’t be used or formatted whereas before SmartWare it was an accessible drive I used often.
Why do I have to keep writing the same thing - the drive has NOT failed. On any other PC in Windows Explorer it is reported as a fully functioning device but on my PC it is unusable - since I installed SmartWare.
