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Vista 64bit stopped recognizing and connecting to external drives...

pghjezebel — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 19:59:18 -0800

Vista 64bit has recently stopped recognizing my iPhone and WD MyBook external HD...please help! I have a WD 500GB MyBook and an iPhone. Both have connected without problems to my Vista 64bit machine. Now, I can no longer access them.

My PC on some level still "sees" the devices because the iPhone will connect and sync with iTunes and the HD is listed in the device manager. However it is listed as "This device is not configured correctly." I've tried uninstalling, disabling, reinstalling drivers, different ports and have had no luck getting my machine to see either device.

And I've verified that there is nothing wrong with the HD or the iPhone. Both connect flawlessly on my husband's Vista (non 64bit of course) machine.

Any suggestions would be appreciated! Thanks!

External hard drive problem with XP

droplet — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:47:04 -0800

Can I get my WD external hard drive back to the way it was? Last year, I bought a WD5000C032 My Book Essential 500GB external hard drive. It's plug and play, so I plugged it in, formatted it, Windows assigned it as drive I and all was good. I got XP Service Pack 3 a few weeks ago and all seemed well. Also, XP is set up to automatically update, I use CCleaner about 2x a week, and I've got AVG 7.5 as my virus detector.

Last Friday, while on my computer, I got the data write error message. I'd never seen that before. There was only one folder in it when I checked the drive. I shut down, unplugged everything and rebooted. Then I replugged. Nothing. In the device manager, it's detected as a device, but disk management doesn't detect it as a drive. GetDataBack listed the device as a 2TB drive, which it isn't. Upon starting the data retrieval procedure, it gave me an "I/O error 23," showed 10 bad sectors and then stopped responding.

I've looked up on the the Windows XP support site and on various tech forums for a solution, but none seem to work. I also downloaded the WD drive manager from the support page, ran it and nada. The drive manager doesn't even see the drive.

Am I screwed? I will have a straight-up fit if I lose the media on this drive.

Why are transfers to my external firewire drive so slow?

Venadium — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:14:03 -0800

What kind of transfer speeds should I be expecting from my new external Firewire 800 drive? I just hooked up my new WD MyBook Pro (the one with 3 different interfaces) to my Macbook Pro. After deleting all the junk that came installed on the drive, I started transferring over some of my stuff, starting with about 8gigs worth of backed-up DVDs (it was actually 2 DVD disc images). It took less than 5 minutes to transfer, but crapped out on me right before it finished giving me some cryptic error. I looked it up a bit and it seems to have something to do with the fact that the drive was still formatted in FAT32, which I would have changed anyway had I noticed that. So I reformatted the drive to HFS+ using Disc Utility, and started the transfers over again. This time it took about 20 minutes to transfer the same amount of data. After that was finished, I transfered about 3.5gigs worth of pictures and again this took longer than I would have expected, about 10 minutes.

Also, even after the transfers completed, the circular LED thing on the front of the enclosure is still rotating, which according to the manual means the drive is in use. Could this be related? Does anyone have any ideas as to what's going on?

It's keeeeeeling me!

Bageena — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 10:11:19 -0800

Please help me figure out why my computer stops reading my 1TB WD My Book Premium II external storage thinger before I punch it. I've searched for an answer all over the internets, but my Googlefu is weak on this one. I bought it about three months ago, I have a Dell machine with WindowsXP. I'm using regular ol' USB. Sometimes, it works for days on end without issues. Sometimes, it stops every few minutes. Here is what happens;

The external makes a clicking sound, the lights on the ring go dark for a second, then go warm in the middle and another light makes it's way around the circle like an Xb360 controller. Meanwhile, my computer just stops reading the drive. I have to unplug the power supply from the back of the storage unit, then plug it back in for Windows to sense it again. Sometimes when I do this, it changes drive letters (J:, K:, whatever). I wouldn't care so much if I didn't think this was probably fragmenting the heck out of all my info stored on the unit. Please? Help? I'll give you a cookie.