WD MyBook problems

[JohnMalcolm1970]

I bought a couple of 2TB external WD Mybook Essential drives around the time I got my PC from PCS. I used one for saving documents, music, files, torrents, etc. The other one I setup to use WD's backup software which I seem to remember making all sorts of glorious promises. I set it to backup important stuff: Emails and a lot of rather hefty and numerous Photoshop files. I have almost 40GB of stuff relating to digital art commissions that I like to keep safe. I manually back that stuff up also at the end of a project.

I've spent a lot of time over the past couple of days working on a commission for a magazine. It's nearing the final stages. I had been saving sequential files as I went along, into the project folder on the first WD drive. I jump between Painter 12 and Photoshop a lot while working on these. I was taking a break and watching some TV when I heard the old USB device disconnection noise. I figured one of the cats had bumped something. I went back to work.

I had the file open in Painter 12 and I hit CTRL+S. No file activity happened since I hadn't actually done anything since my last save. I went to Photoshop and up to the recent files list to open the file. I got an error saying the file couldn't be found. I went to My Computer and noticed both WD Mybooks were gone. I checked the power leads and USB cables at both ends on both drives. I thought a restart might be in order. I foolishly closed Painter 12... realising as it happened that the only full copies of the work were on one of two drives that had just disappeared.

I swung into full panic mode. I looked in the WD software and saw only one drive with the words: "No writable partition" or words to that effect. I rebooted. My PC seemed to hang forever at the BIOS screen. I quickly disconnected all other USB stuff. I held the power button down. I rebooted. Still no joy. I started googling. I read something about power supplies for WD external drives failing. I swapped them round. I also updated the WD Smartware software and rebooted again.

I now have my most important drive of the two up and running. I very quickly backed the important stuff up onto another drive. The other WD drive is showing in Disk Management as Healthy but with no filing system. Earlier I could swear it said RAW (and it should of course be NTFS). The only think I've done since then is run WD Lifegaurd Diagnostics on that drive. It passed that with flying colours (quick test only).

My questions are:

1) What the hell happened? Could it me a problem with my motherboard USB stuff? They are connected to USB 3.0.
2) What should I do with that drive? Format? Contact WD? Contact Amazon?
3) After I updated the WD software and rebooted it informed me of a firmware update (3.1.0.11B). Should I install it? In the WD diagnostic my drive has firmware 1003, which I believe is the initial release.
4) Is there anything I can do to prevent this happening again? It seems perverse that the drive that was claiming to be safeguarding all my important file backups was the one that's causing problems.

I hold off on doing anything major until I've heard anyone's thoughts... I might allow that WD diagnostic to run a full test when I go to my bed tonight. I'm normally fairly calm and unruffled by PC problems, but this one shook me up. The thought of cramming days worth of work into Sunday redoing an illustration from scratch was horrifying.

 

[Buzz]

It could have been a power surge.
If you format the drive you will prob not get your work back.
If you update firmware you will prob not get work back.
If the drives are new then contact the seller and organise an RMA.
There is not much you can do to prevent it from happening bar make sure you use a surge protector. Other then that its really luck of the draw as far as how well an item will perform and last.

Is it a case now of when you plug in your External drives that you see 0gig free 0 gig used space???

Not sure if you are trying to get your Data back but if you are you could try this...

1 : Download Paragon-Mount-Everything-Personal-3.0-File-managers
2 : Install and restart comp.
3 : Start menu / All Programs / Paragon mount everything 3.5 / Volume Explorer ~ Right click Volume Explorer and select properties
under comparability select run as Win XP (SP3) and run as admin and apply and ok

Now Go back to Start menu / All Programs / Paragon mount everything 3.5 / Volume Explorer
And open Volume Explorer prog.

See if your External drives show up. If they do select it and open. Once open select all your files to restore and right click them and export.

Hopefully at least if your drives are broken then at least you maybe able to get files back. After you have restored your files you can then go ahead and try update firmware and/or Format them.

Hope this helps.

 

[Finn]

Not sure I followed properly, was it the power supply that went? If so contact either the orginal retailer, or WD, if WD they tend to be a bit slow (like 6 weeks slow) but should send you a replacement powersupply.

In general though no device is 100% reliable, every device fails and an external usb is no more reliable than an internal drive, the reliabilty comes in from keeping multiple copies of any data you value. For instance, I have more than 100gigs (and growing) of photos I have taken that are completely irreplacable (DSLR saving raw files so each one is quite large) and I have 3 copies spread across 3 different drives of different types/manufactures (one internal, one USB, one NAS). 2 drives going at the same time is rare but does happen, I'm betting that the chances of all 3 drives going are so minimal as to be not worth bothering about. People who are care seriously about data integrity even go so far as to refuse to use drives from the same manufacturers batch as there have been cases of every drive from the same batch failing simultanously due to some unknown-of-until-that-point manufacturing defect.

Basically make sure there are *always* multiple copies of any data you value and replicate the data often enough that a failure at the worst possible time (as thats usually when it happens!) causes you an acceptable amount of duplicate work (only you can decide what that level is). A USB drive used instead of an internal drive offers no additional reliability, but keeping a copy on both dramatically reduces your chance of losing data.