Western Digital 2TB Caviar Green once worked but now is no longer being recognized by my computer

[lolninja481]

Hello folks, about a year and a half ago I bought a Western Digital 2TB Mybook Essential and it worked great for about a year or so. After this time I noticed it was not always being recognized by my computer when I plugged it in via USB 2.0. Eventually it got to the point where the drive would only be recognized maybe once out of 10 tries and when it was recognized a dialog box came up and said the drive was not readable. Then I opened up the disc utility to try and repair it and the size reading was something in the neighborhood for 144 PB instead of the 2 TB it should read. I read on a forum somewhere that it could be the connectors on the enclosure that the drive came in so I took the enclosure apart and out the drive in a Rosewill enclosure that supports the drive. As you can imagine this did not solve the problem. Is there anything I can do to have my drive function properly again or should I give up and buy a new drive?

I am currently running Mac OSX 10.6.8.

This is what happens when the drive is finally recognized

[ragdexx]

since you took the unit out of the enclosure, Have you try to use the unit internally on a desktop computer?

[lolninja481]

No, I don’t have access to a desktop that I can put it into.

[ragdexx]

I see, it seems to be that the unit is corrupted.  if you have the information on a different location, you can try initializing the drive.

[lolninja481]

I’m not worried about losing the information, it’s nothing that I can’t replace on it. When I initialize that dialogue box just goes away and nothing else happens. All the options there were grey before are still grey.

[fzabkar]

@lolninja481, ISTM that your drive has failed. One of the symptoms of a failed drive is when it reports a nonsensical value of 0xFFFFFFFFFFFF for the total number of sectors. That’s “all ones” in hexadecimal.

In a typical Windows environment, only the lower 32 bits of the above value are used, in which case the drive’s capacity is seen as 2.2TB or 2TiB.

Apparently your Mac is able to see the full 48-bit value, in which case the capacity is reported as 128PiB or 144PB.