My external drive WD My book essential (1140) is recognized on the list of drives and in the device manager, and from a 3rd party file manager (FreeCommander) I can copy to the disk, delete etc. The back up seems to work, too. But neither Windows Explorer, nor scandisk can access the drive. The firmware updater produces a message saying an error has occurred. The smartware updater appears to run normally, but after rebooting I am still on version 1.4.5.2 and get a message that an update is available.
How can I solve this paradoxical situation?
Hello,
How is the drive showing under disk management?
Did you set any password protection on the drive?
Make sure to check on disk management to see if the drive is getting a letter assigned.
Thanks for your response.
Under Disk Managment it appears as My Book (G:), Status Healthy (Primary Partition) and WD Unlocker (F:) also healthy.
Yes I have assigned a password.
And a drive letter does get assigned, I can even change it under disk management.
In Windows explorer I get the normal drive icons and letters, but when I try to open it I get: G:\ is not accessible. Access denied and a similar message comes up when I try to run scandisk, disk clean up or defragment.
The unlocker partition (F:) does work, when I double click that in Explorer, Ithe unlocking program does run and tell me that the drive is unlocked when that is appropriate.
At the moment none of this is a real problem, but as this is my back up disk I really need to be sure everything is OK, that I can keep the software up to date and that I could restore my data on this or if necessary another computer.
I would be grateful for any advice.
Since my last post I have discovered that while the initial back up worked at least as a partial backup, nothing seems to have been backed up since then even though it should back up continuously.
The SmarWare backup screen says "ready to perform back up, and my internal hard drive is displayed as usual (indicating “data for Backup, Files 31,375, Size 101,05GB”, and one category still half in yellow) whereas the WD drive G appears all grey, with “Data backed up, Files 31,315, Size 39.02”.
So something is definitely very wrong. I would be grateful for help.
