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Does a WD MyBook have a trouble light?

mysterious1der — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 09:55:44 -0800

How to tell if WD MyBook mirroring has failed or drive has died? Getting ready to send my little sister off to college on another continent. She'll be taking an external hard drive with her to backup to (plus the Mozy Unlimited that she's already on, because if it's only backed up once, it's not backed up). My current thinking is to send her with one of those dual-drive WD MyBooks, probably 2TB mirrored down to 1TB.

I'm fairly distrusting of the WD software, so I'll be setting up some mirroring with SyncBack Free (at least two, if not 3 backup sets at nightly, weekly, and monthly intervals).

Main question: if she's not running the WD bundled software, will she get a visible indicator if 1 of the 2 RAID1 hard drives fails? Even a red LED will be fine. I realize there's no way Windows would recognize the failure, so the only thing I can imagine would be something built into the hardware.

How do I access my network storage from my new computer?

carsonb — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 23:48:11 -0800

How can I access my WD MyBook World Network Storage Drive from my new (Ubuntu 8.04) computer now that my old (WinXP) box is dead dead dead? I can access the PUBLIC folder no problem, but I have ~100Gb of music in a different folder that's behind a user/pass that I think I had stored in MioNet but can't remember anymore. So, a few questions if you please,

Is there a way for me to access this folder without MioNet? I downloaded Wine today; can I use that to run MioNet? Would that help? Would an SSH tunnel give me access? (damn damn damn MioNet! I'd much prefer to stay away from that horrid program.)

(I've seen the above question answered on the Ubuntu forums, but get stuck on the first step, thus:)
How can I find out the IP address for my network drive? Ubuntu 'sees' it, but I can't seem to wring any relevant information out of what's presented.

Finally, given the answer to the above question, and if it comes to this, will resetting the admin password on the drive (using a paperclip in the little hole on the back) erase all my data?

There's a small chance I can get my old box up and running for a short time, but I salvaged the network card from it so it's offline. I'm really feeling my way through the transition from Windows to Ubuntu, and am not yet altogether familiar with the Terminal interface, so please try to be clear and refrain from jargon without explanation. Thank you very much for any help!

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?

How do I deal with forbidden characters during HD backup?

Capri — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 20:09:26 -0800

[MacFilter] I am trying to back up my iMac onto a portable HD. I get an error for each folder/file name with non-alphanumeric characters, and once the error pops up, the copying stops cold. Please help me find a way around this. I am preparing my iMac, which is running 10.3.9, for upgrade to Leopard. Since I plan to do a completely clean install (based partly on advice found elsewhere on MeFi), I am backing up every file onto a Western Digital (WD) portable hard drive connected via USB port.

I select the Documents folder and drag it to the WD/HD icon. Copying starts and almost immediately stops, with an error stating that the file named "* Simon" cannot be copied because the file name contains a character that can't be used. Obviously it's referring to the *. I click OK, and that's it. All copying stops. Nothing else starts. My entire backup is aborted. So far, one file has been copied. This is not good.

If I change "* Simon" to just "Simon" and start over, it works, until it gets to the next file containing a non-alphanumeric character. I have been a Macintosh user since 1984, and am consequently in the habit of using pretty much any character I want in my file names, so hundreds of my folder and file names are affected. It's just not possible to go through the entire tree and manually change each one.

So -- my questions:

1. Is there a way to get the WD/HD to deal with these file names?

2. Is there a way to do a mass search and replace on all the offensive characters on my iMac's HD? (This is obviously less optimal, since I used those characters in file names for a reason, i.e. I wanted them in there. But I am willing to make this massive change to avoid the alternatives.)

3. Is there something else that I am not thinking of that would solve the problem?

Thanks in advance.

Why won't WinXP recognize my WD MyBook by firewire?

RossWhite — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 15:52:51 -0800

How can I get my Western Digital MyBook drive to show up when connecting with firewire? I've connected with USB 2.0 to my WinXP machine and installed the firewire drivers that came on the hard drive. Rebooted, then plugged in the drive with firewire. Can't get Windows to recognize the drive. I've also installed the firewire drivers on the Western Digital site. Still no luck. Any suggestions?

Help? My RAID Crashed!

drgonzo2k2 — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:25:55 -0800

What happened to my RAID setup today? Ok, here was my setup:

PowerMac G4 (Gigabit Ethernet) Dual 500 Mhz, 512 MB RAM
40 GB IDE HD for System HD
(4) Western Digital 250 GB SATA2 Drives
Highpoint Technologies RocketRaid 1810A PCI SATA RAID Card

I've been working on/building computers for a LONG time, so I'm pretty handy inside the case. I set this up about a month ago to use as my home media server. The 4 SATA2 drives were setup as RAID 5 using the RocketRaid controller. After parity and formatting overhead, I had about 700 GB free to use.

Absolutely no problems, running more or less 24/7 for about a month. Today I just thought I'd open up the RAID web interface from my iMac to poke around a little bit. When I logged in, it immediately told me my RAID status was "critical." When I went into array maintenance, it said that drive 2 was offline. I checked the log and didn't see any note of when it had happened.

I disconnected the system, and brought it out to have a look. I just opened it up and made sure all the connections were good. I didn't smell anything unusual. I took it back into the bedroom where it normally stays, and hooked it back up. Now it wouldn't turn back on. It would start and stop almost instantly like something was shorting out or grounded.

I brought it back out to have a look, and when I opened it up, I smelled that smell that means something bad has happened. After some trial and error, I discovered the system would not boot with drive 4 connected. I pulled it out of the case, and it definitely had the fried electronics smell. I hooked everything else back up, and it booted fine. But when I checked the RAID status it was only recognizing 1 drive. This means that 3/4 drives failed.

I verified that all of the power connections and SATA connections on the controller card were working by testing them on the remaining working drive. Everything checked out, 3 failed drives, 1 working drive, all connections fine. Only 1 of the drives had that burnt electronics smell, the other two that failed didn't have any smell at all.

My question is what could have possibly caused all of this? I know that all 4 drives were working fine less than a week ago, so at most I've been running degraded for 4-5 days. Is it really possible that all three drives failed within minutes of each other? The real kicker is that I went with this route to give me the most capacity and still have the parity for protection. I've lost a lot of data; I probably had about 80% or more backed up to disc, so it's not a total loss. I've already RMA'd the drives with Western Digital, but I'm scared to rebuild the array without knowing what caused it. I don't know if I can trust it now, and I don't want to go through this in another month or so.

Also, if you'd recommend against rebuilding the array, I'm open for suggestions for 700 GB+ storage solutions capable of streaming HD content over the network that will work well serving to primarily Macs.

What does this hard drive have against my CD drive?

radioamy — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 12:03:09 -0800

Why the @#$% did this external hard drive do to my computer's CDRW drive!!?!?!?! So last week I was trying to transfer a slew of pictures from my boss's laptop (HP?, XP) to mine (IBM T41, XP/SP2). The intarweb was being finicky so I bought a 60GB Western Digital USB portable hard drive. The drive seemed to come with some software and junk, but I just used it like a plug n play device.

My boss called me yesterday freaking out because his laptop won't burn CD's. He said it froze every time he tried to. He tried restoring to a previous configuration (or whatever that option is) and it wouldn't let him. Then today I just tried to burn a CD in iTunes, and it locked up on me. WTF?

I put in a message through WD's website but I don't have the serial number of the product in front of me so I can't call them right now. So, hive mind, any ideas?