I’ve tried anything. This unit is near new, and it won’t even read. The device shows up under the “Hard Disk Drives” section in windows (But only momentarily before dissapearing again), but cannot be opened, and you can’t read the properties tab of it, or even right click it without the window freezing. This is the ONLY hard drive that I have that does this. Again, it cannot be read from or written to, and Data Lifegaurd Diagnostic can’t even find the capacity of the disk. I want SO BADLY just to wipe this thing clean and just get my hard earned money back, but I can’t return it with so much valuable personal information on it.
Any help in wiping this thing clean would be greatly appreciated.
Make sure both ends of cable are pushed right in, the stiff USB cable manages to work itself out of my PC socket causing disconnects!
Try nudging the usb cable into different positions near the My Book usb socket - very gently!!
Then try gently pushing the usb connector (wiggle cable usb plug a tiny amount to different positions) you might be able to reconnect whilst holding on in a working position - until you wipe the drive
I had this problem off and on for about 2 years. I even tried “jiggling” the cable. I have a My Book WD2500, which is the 250G external hard drive. The cable is firewire-to-USB, and my OS is Windows Vista (hate it). I have had at least 7 almost heart attacks for lost docs/data, which I later recovered by some kind of magic between restarts and order of powering up/connecting the cable. Hours of time wasted.
Today on this forum I saw buried in another reply the solution of plugging the external drive directly to an outlet, rather than into a power strip or the back of the computer. Tried it today, plugged directly to a wall socket, and my drive booted up in about 30 seconds with ALL FILES visible and available. Thanks to whoever posted this solution.
