WD My Book Essential problem. Help?

[orasa]

Right … so here’s what’s going on. I have a WD 1TB external hard drive. It’s a My Book Essential. About a month or so ago, this thing stopped coming up whenever I unplugged it from my laptop and plugged it back in. The ONLY way the drive would come up again is after a restart of my laptop. Said laptop is a Sony Vaio,  VGN-FZ140E

Turns out the thing is going into Standby whenever it gets unplugged - which is fine. But it used to come back up when it was plugged in again. And now it’s not. Until restart of the laptop. This is really quite annoying since I move the laptop around almost every day and don’t want to be forced to restart it every single time I need to do something with the My Book. Can anyone think of some way to get the drive to come up again without restarting? I’ve searched around on Google, etc and haven’t found anything on this problem D:

I have the most recent drivers for the My Book installed. I also have the latest WD Smartware installed

[Roamingjay]

Firstly are you “safely removing it” IE getting windows to power it off before unplugging it? Secondly have you tried turning the power to the Mybook off and on before plugging it back in?

Try uninstalling the drivers for the Mybook through the Device manager and seeing if refreshing the driver helps.

Failing that try dissabling the USB hub in the device manager and re-enabling it to purge the USB PnP (Which you may have to do every time.

[orasa]

I never really ‘safely remove’ anything, it’s never made a difference before. None of my other devices are ‘safely removed’ and they all work fine when plugged back in.

I have tried uninstalling the driver and updating it - didn’t work.

I don’t know which of the USB ports the drive is connected to, and don’t know how to find out to turn it off and back on as suggested.

A note, though: Before plugging the drive in, it is off. I have tried unplugging power, then plugging it in and it does the same thing. The WD Smartwave “CD” comes up when I plug the drive in, and the light on the front stays steady for a while before going into standby. For some reason, it simply will not pull up the drive itself, with all my files, until I restart the computer.

[orasa]

Ah, figured out which USB it was on. Disabling it and re-enabling it just brings up the SmartWare CD as I said before.

When I tell it to run SmartWare rather than just closing out this window I get an error saying there is no readable partition on the drive. However, I know that there is because anytime I restart the computer with the drive plugged in everything works fine.

This is so confusing and frustrating @@

[Roamingjay]

Does the drive show up under administrative tools>computer management>disk management?

You can dissable the Smartwave virtual CD software in the smartwave settings.

[Bill_S]

orasa wrote:

Ah, figured out which USB it was on. Disabling it and re-enabling it just brings up the SmartWare CD as I said before.

 

When I tell it to run SmartWare rather than just closing out this window I get an error saying there is no readable partition on the drive. However, I know that there is because anytime I restart the computer with the drive plugged in everything works fine.

 

This is so confusing and frustrating @@

There is a reason you are supposed to safely remove the drive, all the time.   If you don’t you could end up with corrupted files or a partition that is no longer readable - which is what I suspect has happened in your case.  This will especially happen if there is data still in the cache when you pulled the data cable.

If the drive shows up in Disk Management, then you could try and find data recovery software that might restore the parttion.  Or if you had the data backed up, as you should, then you can just repartition and format the drive, and restore the data back to the drive.

[orasa]

The partition is never actually gone, though.

Just now I restarted my computer and the drive came up just like it always has. All of my files and data is still there. Nothing has been corrupted or lost. That’s why I am confused when the drive doesn’t come up unless I restart.

[Roamingjay]

Sounds like windows is confusing itslef as to when and where the drive is.

Couple of things to check:

1. With the drive working correctly (IE After a fresh boot) Load up admin tools>disk management and see what drives you have present. Post the results as a screen grab (You can do this by pressing  the “Print Scrn” button located to the right of the “F12” key and pasting the image into a photo editing program (Or MS Paint).

2. Unplug the drive as you usually do, then refresh the disk management window to see if it’s still there. Post back a screen grab.

3. Plug the drive back in again, wait 5 mins and refresh the disk management window to see if it’s regestering. Again post back the results

4. Follow steps 1-3 again but this time “safely unplug” the drive. Again post back the results at steps 1-3.

Please do post what you do and what the result is so we know what’s going on and can help further. 

[Bill_S]

There could be a couple of things causing this.  First of all, if you’re not safely removing the drive, then start.  Now, is the drive showing up when you boot your computer, but later on disappearing?  If so, it could be that you’re computer is going to sleep and is still sending power to the drive.  Which means, the drive still thinks it’s connected, even though the computer has lost connection to it. 

However, if the drive is sometimes showing up in Windows, and sometimes not, that could be either a power issue or a bad data cable.  Change the data cable.  If you’re plugged into a power strip with other devices, you may not be able to draw enough power to spin the drive up fully, and it does not get recognized.  Try plugging into the wall directly to test it a few times and see if that fixes it.  If it doesn’t then you may have a faulty power supply.