Western Digital My Book Essential misery....

J

JuniorII

New Member
I need some advice technology savvy people.

I have (had?) a Western Digital My Book Essential 2 TB external hard drive. It has (had?) my entire music and movie collection on it. My plan had been to back that hard drive up with another hard drive just like it and keep the back up in a safe deposit box.

Well, yesterday the hd just..... stopped being a hd. If it is plugged into a computer (I've tried 3 so far) it can be ejected as a device but that's about it.

I've been reading about how the controller card can go bad in these drives, it's kind of a known issue. And the card can be replaced, if you get an identical one.

What I want to know is, how do I know if the it is the card that is bad, or a cable, or just the damn drive? And what would you do here? Besides never having bought that hd in the first place and put all your eggs in one basket. Like I said,, entire media collection at stake here....
 
Will there be an issue with encryption? I've read that the internal controller board for the hard drive also encrypts the data on the hard drive. That's why you need to get the same board.....
 
Unless you set it to encrypt the data then no there should be no issue with encryption.
 
Could I just remove it from the enclosure and put it in my pc and skip the enclosure thing completely? At this point, I have very little faith in WD products and just want the chance to transfer the data to another, more reliable drive.
 
JuniorII said:
Could I just remove it from the enclosure and put it in my pc and skip the enclosure thing completely? At this point, I have very little faith in WD products and just want the chance to transfer the data to another, more reliable drive.
Click to expand...

Yeah you could do that. Don't lose your faith in WD products. They're good drives.
 
OK, I opened the case and removed the hard drive. I installed it in my PC and even though it said the device was ready and all that it doe snot appear anywhere except the device manager. It says the device is working properly but the only drive available is my original C drive.
 
JuniorII said:
OK, I opened the case and removed the hard drive. I installed it in my PC and even though it said the device was ready and all that it doe snot appear anywhere except the device manager. It says the device is working properly but the only drive available is my original C drive.
Click to expand...

Check Disk Management and be sure it's assigned a drive letter. Don't initialize it or format it as you may lose your data.
 
What i am seeing in disc management is Disc 0 which is my original main hard drive, Disc 1 which is the Western Digital I just put in. It is showing as Unallocated. Both are showing as Online. Disc 1 does not seem to assigned a letter.

Is that bad?
 
Run western digital drive diagnostic on it and see if there are errors. Most likely it does.
 
I ran both the Quick Test and the Extended Test and it doesn't look too good:

Test Option: QUICK TEST
Model Number: WDC WD20EARX-00PASB0
Unit Serial Number: WD-WCAZAD244720
Firmware Number: 51.0AB51
Capacity: 2000.40 GB
SMART Status: PASS
Test Result: FAIL
Test Error Code: 06-Quick Test on drive 2 did not complete! Status code = 07 (Failed read test element), Failure Checkpoint = 97 (Unknown Test) SMART self-test did not complete on drive 2!
Test Time: 18:50:29, July 12, 2013

Test Option: EXTENDED TEST
Model Number: WDC WD20EARX-00PASB0
Unit Serial Number: WD-WCAZAD244720
Firmware Number: 51.0AB51
Capacity: 2000.40 GB
SMART Status: PASS
Test Result: FAIL
Test Error Code: 08-Too many bad sectors detected.
Test Time: 19:06:17, July 12, 2013
 
It's not even 6 months old! I hate Western Digital with the fury of a thousand suns! That's my entire media library.
 
Hard drives are mechanical devices, they can go bad at any time. Thats why you should always back up important data to more than one device. I haven't had a western digital drive go bad on me in the last 5 years or so. I use them on all my builds I do for clients. I've had more Seagates go out than anything.
 
In Disk Management I right clicked on the drive in the lower part of DM, and New Simple Volume was available, so I clicked it. Now the drive is assigned a letter, it shows up in the top part of the DM but when I click 'explore' it tells me that I need to formart the disk before I can use it.

What does it all mean!?!
 
It means the drive has errors on it and that is why you are getting the message that it needs to be formatted. Even if you try to format it, it most likely won't because of the errors. You can try running file recovery program to see if you can recover your files. Try recuva and others.

http://www.piriform.com/recuva
 
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