Well I pulled my old My Book Premium II (2 x 500GB, Raid 1) from the safe to do a backup. Loaded WD Drive Manager on my new computer and plugged in drive. Got the “… has a problem” message. When I hover over the icon at the bottom of the screen next to the clock, it shows the raid and the percent used, but says “unknown”. Going into drive manager did not provide any options as it said no devices found. Problem occurred with both USB and Firewire and on 2 different computers. I also update the firmware on the My Book. The drive _ does _ show under “Computer” and all data is accessible.
At this point, I figured the problem had to be in the My Book. I did the following:
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Powered off My Book.
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Opened the case
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Disconnected the second drive (Drive B)
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Powered back on
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Went into Drive Manager and now it showed the Raid, albeit with one drive missing.
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Powered off My Book
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Unplugged first drive (Drive A), plugged in second drive (Drive B) only
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Powered back on
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Drive manager now showed the “WU2T… has a problem” message so I assumed problem was with drive B.
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To be sure, I switched drive positions and tested again to eliminate onboard controller in My Book as problem.
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Same results. Problem followed the drive.
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Took bad drive B and installed in another computer.
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Low and behold, it fired right up and showed all my data. As this is Raid 1, all data is mirrored.
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I assumed at that point that the only thing wrong was the Raid information on the drive, but there is no way to simply fix it as Drive Manager refuses to see the drive.,
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Went into Disk Management and removed the volume/partition data on drive B.
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Re-installed drive B in the My Book.
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Powered it up
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Drive manager opened as normal and simply determined that a new drive had been installed and set about rebuilding the raid array.
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All is again good.
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Just as an FYI, the rebuild takes forever. The My Book said 11+ hours for a 500GB and that seems about right.
I am guessing that you can more or less follow these steps on a MAC as well.
As a further note, you may find that your “bad” drive has actually failed, but this test will help you determine that as well. If you cannot see the data when the “bad” drive is installed in another computer, then it is pretty safe to assume that the drive itself is bad. At that point, you either replace the drive and rebuild the raid array or simply copy your data from the My Book to a new external drive.
Hope this helps those who may have given up even though this is an old product.
Good Luck!
