There is NO WAY I am giving anyone on their “partner” list a call, those people surely know of the problem by now as well. If they continue to be associated with western digital and profit from their fraud–then they too are to be despised as far as I am concerned.

Needless to say, I couldn’t afford the data recovery-so I lost a lot of files, some of them rather small story ideas and the like. They aren’t worth a lot, but they were of value to me. Now they are gone forever.

thanks Western Digital,

Thanks for nothing.

Maybe WD can tell me how to extract data from my harddrive without paying some third party company 500 bucks. WD can try to say they aren’t a bad company, maybe they are a good company, maybe this product is just their product to date. I am glad this blog is here so future possible customers of WD will see the downfalls of this horrible drive and go elsewhere.

I have to say that recently, I was able to get an exchange of my 250GB Essential Edition My Book for the newer-model 320GB Essential Edition (with the blue light and slit instead of the green light and circle), and this new drive works as the older one should have, getting recognized within 12 seconds. Still, I’ve learned from this experience, and I most likely will steer clear of Western Digital from now on.

If you get a WD hard drive, I’d recommend getting it exchanged for another brand as soon as possible. I don’t mean to endorse or anything, but I’ve personally had good luck with SimpleTech’s 500GB Pininfarina product.

Perhaps even better than getting a pre-built external hard drive, though, is making your own with an internal hard drive from a manufacturer you trust (obviously if you’re here, Western Digital doesn’t fit that bill) and an external hard drive enclosure. This way, you can have better peace of mind that the hard drive will work, and you have the added versatility in that you can always use the hard drive *inside* your computer if you want to do so.

To make matters worse, I’m in Australia so support will be even more difficult to get.

I hope you read this try typing in this in to google and see what come up “mybook show up in device manager but is not in assigned a driver letter in windows” and see what comes up nothing but customer dissatisfaction with your companies products with no tech support in site. You cant even dl software for xp or vista for most of your hard drives and don’t include it except for on the hard drive itself. The only way to dl any software for my os fill out pages of marketing questions. Tech support is almost impossible to get to as I was on the toll free number was on the phone going through menus for over 10 minutes, and when I did get through the menus I waited on hold until I got sick of it and hung up. Firstly you should included a CD with the needed software and trouble shooting software in case the drives software becomes corrupt. Western Digital drives arn’t cheep so ante up and put some cd’s in the box for the love of Homer Simpson. Secondly this problem seems all but common place with no help in sight for most people you should have investigated this problem by now and determined if it can be solved. Once that’s been done you need to make the solution readily available or offer some kind recompense to those who have working hardware that just is will not work on a particular system for no logical reason. I mean if you type it in to google you can see for yourself how many people are complaining it’s common problem so it should be easy to find an answer if not a solution at the western digital web page… Good Luck finding it!!!!

I did so, and it came back, empty but working, and I haven’t had any problems with it since. Because I am clearly an idiot, I bought a 1Tb My Book Premium II. This worked for perhaps two weeks before dropping out. The system can still see the drive, via Disk Management and via the RAID Disk Manager utility supplied with the drive, but it doesn’t work. The drive does not appear to be partitioned any more, and nothing I can do will make it repartition itself. I again contacted WD to ask for advice, but their tech support is atrocious; it’s now two weeks since I initially emailed them, and still no response.

Because I have changed my email address at some point over the last 12 months, I am also unable to reconcile the two accounts I have with them, because I have to confirm the change in email address with the old account, which does not work any more, so any access to tech support for the old drives is impossible (I tried to re-register them but it refused as it recognised the serial numbers)

Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever buy a Western Digital drive. Ever.

Any other company’s product has to be better than this and has to treat their customers with more respect. Yes they’re cheap, but as I have learned, you buy cheap, you get cheap.

please god, tell me someone has a solution! I have irreplaceable session files (from studio recording sessions) I cannot afford to lose and need soon.

I can’t believe this, that I trusted WD, thinking they were a large company.

is there somewhere respected that I could complain, that might resul tin other people becoming aware of the absolute garbage that WD is selling? I just dont want this to happen to someone else. WD should not have a good rep when they put out a product this obviously defective, and I was told by a support rep at WD (all they tell you is that you can return it and get another..helps NOT AT ALL-because the other one would just do the same, hence cant be used) that the majority of the calls he gets every day are for the my books and that most of those are customers with the same problem i have.

http://infotechsolutions.wordpress.com/2006/09/22/application-popup-windows-delayed-write-failed-windows-was-unable-to-save-all-the-data-for-the-file-name_of_the_file_you_want_to_save/

Seriously, though, I don’t have the drive hooked up right now, since it’s not working. However, if memory serves, it did not show up in Disk Management, but the device did show up in the Device Manager. Not sure, but I don’t think there was a negative status listed in the general tab.

I don’t think it’s an issue with my computer. I’ve had this PC since the summer of the 2004, and had no problem with the My Book for the first ten months or so of using it. I did have some sort of PC failure at the end of October, where Windows could not boot up in normal mode. The dopes at Dell tech support didn’t bother to help me diagnose and fix the problem. They just told me to reinstall Windows, mainly because they are too dumb and/or lazy to suggest any other course of action. However, for some reason I couldn’t reinstall Windows from the OS disc, so I wound up having to restore from the “Dell recovery partition”, which basically reformatted by C drive and then reset it to the way it came to me from the factory.

However, the My Book still worked fine for about a month after that. It wasn’t until I got that DWF error that you-know-what hit the fan.

Oh, and I’m running Norton Internet Security 2007, and I update it often. I run a full system virus scan usually twice a week. In fact I ran a virus scan the day before the drive failed, and I’m pretty sure it gave me a clean bill of health.

Don’t know anybody with a new PC. All my friends and relatives have had their PCs for at least a year or more. I have a friend with a relatively new Mac, but since I formatted the My Book NTFS, I don’t think that a Mac will be able to read it.

I’m not too keen on mailing out the drive to a data recovery service somewhere in another part of the country. I’d rather look for some place local where I can take it in person. Since I live the NYC metro area, I think should have several choices of places to take it to. I just have to make sure I find a data recovery place in my area that’s reliable and trustworthy, and won’t try to rob me blind.

The reason I didn’t suggest to take apart the hard drive yourself and hook it up internally is because it seems to be a mechanical error (i.e. relating to the moving parts), and hooking it up internally won’t fix that or provide a way around that. However, given the fact that you describing to me the situation versus me actually being able to work with the hard drive personally are two separate things, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to try this.

But if the cause of the issue is truly mechanical, then the only thing I can think of to do is send your hard drive in to a data recovery service. They should have special machines in which they can place the hard drive’s platters to retrieve your data, bypassing the hard drive’s own (potentially failed) moving parts.

Of course, the issue could also possibly be with your computer. Do you have internet security software installed (i.e. antivirus, firewall, etc.), and do you update and run it often? Do you have software on your computer that you don’t need? Did your computer come with the operating system pre-installed, or did you install yourself? How long ago did you get your computer (if the OS was pre-installed), or how long ago did you install the OS? Do you have access to a brand-new computer that you could try your hard drive on (other than your friend’s)? Do you have other USB or FireWire cables that you could try? It’s obviously more difficult to diagnose things over the internet, and if I had your drive with me, I wouldn’t be asking so many questions, so sorry for the interrogation!

The clicking only occurs when I first hook up the drive. Maybe a half dozen clicks or so, and then Windows says it has detected the device (though not the actual drive or its partitions). Then the clicking stops. Same happens when I boot up with the drive connected. Makes me think the drive is struggling to find the partitions and that’s why it’s clicking and then stops once it can’t. Like I said, I never had a real problem with this drive up until a few of weeks ago. Now, I could wait until my hair turns gray, and the drive letters won’t be recognized.

I’ve read about some people removing the drive from its enclosure, and hooking directly to an IDE port inside the computer. That seems to solve the problem, and data can be retrieved. I’m a bit hesitant to do this, however.

The whole irony of this whole thing is that I bought this WD My Book because of the various problems I had with my Iomega external. Yet the Iomega is still working. All my data is still there and retrievable from THAT drive, and I can still write to it as well. It’s a real kick in the head.

Okay, with that out of the way, does the hard drive click only a few times, or does it click until you turn it off or unplug it? Also, does the hard drive (and its partitions and data) get recognized if you connect it and wait between 1-2 minutes? My own external Western Digital 250GB hard drive takes over a minute to be fully recognized under Windows Vista (under only 12 seconds with Windows XP, however).

Hard drive clicks always scare me, and in fact, I’m fairly close to exchanging one of my internal hard drives because I don’t want it to fail anytime soon. However, they don’t always mean that the hard drive has mechanically failed. In my experience, many hard drives click from time to time but still work.

Anyway, at worst, if the hard drive still isn’t recognized after waiting between 1-2 minutes, then it very well may in fact be a mechanical failure. In that case, your data should be fine; you just can’t access it. To get it back, you’ll probably have to employ the services of a professional data recovery business. However, I’m not familiar with these services, so I can’t recommend one over another. I merely know that you send your hard drive in to them, they take it apart to copy your data, and then mail your data back to you.

For the future, though, you should make sure that you back up to more than one *good* hard drive. If you get *any* kind of error with a hard drive, especially persistent ones, you should research it to see what it’s about, if there’s anything you can do to prevent it from occurring again, etc. Or you could try to exchange the hard drive for another. Of course, hard drives are certainly capable of failing, so when backing up, you shouldn’t rely solely on them.

In addition to backing up on more than one *good* hard drive, it would also help to back up on CDs or DVDs (or HD-DVDs or Blu-ray discs). They don’t have any moving parts, so you never have to worry about mechanical failures. On the other hand, at least CDs and DVDs (I’m not sure about HD-DVDs or Blu-ray discs) may not last as long as a hard drive may (in terms of data retention).

Another way to back up (which also may be easier) is to back up your data to a server. If ever your hard drives are destroyed (such as in a fire), your data on an external server should still be safe. Now, two drawbacks are: depending on your level of paranoia, you may not be comfortable with having personal data (technically) under the control of anyone else; and depending on how much data you are backing up and your connection speed, the very first back up may take a while, although subsequent backups should only backup new or changed data, resulting in a quicker process.

You see how these three different ways of backing up have their advantages and disadvantages. But that’s why redundancy is the key to backing up; the more copies of your data you have (and on different media, with their pros and cons), the more likely you’ll be able to effectively have access to at least *one* set of your data. And that’s what matters in the end, right?

I wish you luck in retrieving your data; I once lost my entire music library (50+GBs), and I was devastated. Fortunately, I had already been backing up for some time and was able to restore most of it. So I urge you: as soon as you get your data back, back it up on several media! You can never be too safe.

Got any advice? Is there hope or am I screwed?

I managed to try the drive on my parents’ desktop during the holidays (to which they have my old Western Digital 160 GB external connected - in working order), and still no go. I checked disk management, and it’s also not there on either machine. I may follow your suggestion with the taking apart of the drive if I simply cannot get it to run again in order to wipe it of my data - although I’d probably have stick it in my parents’ machine, since I wouldn’t want to bother spending more money to get a different enclosure for use with my laptop. Then I’d be stuck back with the 160 GB drive again.

I think I’m going to give the customer service angle another shot - this time via telephone instead of e-mail. Hopefully since I have a completely non-functional drive they won’t have any chance of getting rid of me!

Also, believe you me, you’re definitely not the only one receiving poor tech support from WD. I contacted them regarding my 250GB Essential Edition external hard drive taking over a minute to be recognized each time I plugged it into any Vista computer, and they basically told me stuff I already knew, that they couldn’t fix the issue, and that I’d be better off contacting Microsoft about it. It’s always nice to be handed off so readily.

1) They’ve apparently “seen” similar cases when the drive was disconnected improperly (without the use of the “safely remove hardware option”). Great, except I had explained in my e-mail that it was brand new, out of the box, and I had simply connected it, started transferring files, and it, unprompted, disconnected itself even though all physical connections were still secure. To top it off, their solution was to reformat the drive…my computer won’t recognize it, so how am I to accomplish that?

2) “If [I] feel the drive may be the cause of [my] problem, [they] would run [their] diagnostic program to see if the hard drive has problems.” Again, I CANNOT SEE THE DRIVE. How is the diagnostic program supposed to analyze a drive that, for all intents and purposes, is not connected?

At the very end, it appears as though they *may* have actually read my e-mail, as they proposed using a WD endorsed data recovery company in order to retrieve my data if the drive isn’t accessible. Overall, though, it appears as though the support simply scanned the e-mail for key words and gave a list of possible problems relating to the finds.

Regardless, at the time when I received the e-mail, the drive was working properly, so I assumed whatever issue was simply a hiccup and was now cleared. I thereby ceased contact on the issue, as it was clear that they weren’t all that invested in the issue anyway. So the drive worked well for about 3 weeks, until last weekend. I had to travel for 3 days, and took my laptop with me. Before leaving, I (properly) disconnected both hard drives (the old one, that works like a charm, and the new one with the earlier problems) with the safely remove hardware option (I’ve done this thousands of times, so I am certain that it was performed correctly and successfully). Both drives shut off upon being disconnected from the computer, as expected. I packed up and left. Upon returning 2 days later, I found that the new hard drive was running, with the blue light on. Odd. So I set up my laptop and connected the drive. Much to my dismay, it was not recognized, just as 3 weeks earlier. I tried connecting the older drive, and it did so just fine. It is now a week later, and the new drive still will not connect and be recognized. I can plug in the power cord, the blue light comes on, but no matter how I try to connect it, it is not recognized.

I apologize for the length of this reply, but I am at my wits end. It is now past the store return policy date, and I’d rather not lose my data (though would do so before being taken advantage of by the ridiculous recovery costs). I also have personal data that I backed up, so I’m a bit wary of sending it, as is, to WD directly. If anyone has any suggestions…I’d just like to get it running, back up the data elsewhere, wipe the drive, and send it off for a refund from WD. I had great experiences with their products in the past, but this has been ridiculous, so I’ll have to find another manufacturer.