My WD My Book 2TB drive is only showing as a local drive now. It was working perfectly, in conjunction with my WD Live media player. I connected it to my computer to add some files, it seemed to get hot very quickly-possibly with a slight burning smell. Now the the drive name, contents and properties are not visible anymore. I have tried the DLG DIAG-QUICK TEST which seemed to freeze at approx.90% after a couple of minutes, then made no more progress in the next two hours until cancelled. The EXTENDED TEST also froze after a couple of minutes at Sector 155903 of 3905656831 Sectors and also had to be cancelled. My question is-- Is this more likely to be a hardware breakdown-which cannot be fixed- or a software/filing system which could be fixed? I have not tried ‘repair’ yet as it might erase the entire contents (Used = 1.59TB…Free = 223GB)
I have other My Book drives, working fine-so it must be the My Book, not the computer?
I have just used Windows Disk Management to check the drive and it reported that the Primary Partition is healthy, but the file system is RAW (not NTFS as it should be). I’ll try DOS to see if it shows my files. To be continued…
Try a Linux Live CD and see if you can access your files with that. Sometimes Test Disk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk will fix corrupt partition data. As a last resort sometimes the command to convert FAT32 to NTFS will fix it. Here is a link http://support.microsoft.com/kb/214579 I’ve seen this recommended on a few different sited by knowledgable people.
Thanks, but reformatting is the absolute last thing I will try. I have other WD 2.0 TB drives, one of which has my entire home movie collection (24 years) worth so I will try everything I can to find the out why the drive went wrong, what the fault is exactly, how to fix it, or at least recover the data first. I’m almost afraid to turn the others on now, in case they go wrong too. Ironically, I recommended these type of drives to two of my Sons, both of whom have bought one, along with the WD TV HD media player. Dave.
I have other WD 2.0 TB drives, one of which has my entire home movie collection (24 years) worth so I will try everything I can to find the out why the drive went wrong, what the fault is exactly, how to fix it, or at least recover the data first. I’m almost afraid to turn the others on now, in case they go wrong too. Ironically, I recommended these type of drives to two of my Sons, both have whom have bought one, along with the WD TV HD media player.
Many, Many, Thanks! I used the TestDisk program. It worked, very easy to use, it immediately showed the Disk Name (Windows 64 bit Vista does not) and by choosing option ‘p’ listed all the files on the drive. I have tested the copy files option on a small file, which worked great. Now I will make some space on another drive and copy the lot, then I will reformat the drive and see if it works.
