I have bought this External Drive for 8 months and it has been working fine, but today I had this problem:
The drive is connected and powered but isn’t found on my computer or even in the Device Manager. I have also tried on another computer and it wasn’t showing the icon on My Computer but it was showing on the Device Manager that it was an unknown device. Therefore I am posting my problem here as most of my files inside that External Drive and I can’t access them.
Thanks in advance
PS: After trying in other computers the device was visible, but I still can’t access my content. It works, it is recognized by the computer but I still can’t reach my files.
I had purchased a new HP i7 computer with all the bells and whistles including a 3.0 built in hub and running Windows 7-64 bit. I then purchased the WD 3TB USB 3.0, Mybook external drive. I plugged the drive into the 3.0 USB input of the computer. The drive was recognized and I thought everything was fine? I then did a backup. After that I plugged it in again and the drive would not be recognized. I then took the computer back to the store I purchased it from and they replaced the computer with a new computer thinking the 3.0 port was bad. On the second computer the recognition of the drive was speratic. Thinking the drive was defective the drive was replaced. Same thing happened with the new drive. So we plugged in a new Seagate USB 3.0 drive and the drive was not recognized at all in the USB 3.0 input. We than looked in the device manager and found a “UNKNOWN DEVICE”. The only way we took care of the problem was to take the computer back to an earlier date. That took care of the problem with the unknown device. We than plugged in the Seagate USB 3.0 3TB drive into the 3.0 input and the drive was recognized and has been doing so sense it has been plugged in.
The problem with the WD USB 3.0 3TB drive is when you plug it into the 3.0 input it will disable that input. The drive will work in the 2.0 USB ports without any problem, but you didn’t purchase the 3.0 drive to run it in the 2.0 USB? The firmware on the hard drive is not set up to run on the 3.0 USB input and if it dose work it won’t work for long.
No matter what you will do will not solve the problem until the firmware from Western Digital makes the changes on the drive. This is one item that was not checked out by their quality control or and the techs that designed the firmware for the drive. I have been using and working on computers sense my first Apple IIe back in 1980’s. By any mends should you have to re-work your mother board or anything else to make their drive work. If the drive is correctly designed it will work correctly right of the box without any modifacations. The drive is plain and simple poorly thought out and then put on the market knowing they had a problem and the USB 3.0 would have problems!! It’s you money.
managed to get it to work by unplugging the USB from my computer, unplugging the external HD power, plugging the HD power back in, then reconnecting the USB cable to my computer. To avoid it happening again i recommend turning the hard drive OFF from the back of the device before switching off your computer, and only switching it on once windows has loaded. Apparently it’s safer to do it this way anyways i remember reading but for reasons i cant remember.
