Dude, wheres my drive?

[dogtanian]

Excuse the awful title but I'm having serious problems.

I have a Western Digital myBook external drive (500GB) which I've partitioned into two parts, 60GB for backup for my Powerbook G4 and the rest for storage.

Unfortunately, for the last few weeks it simply hasn't been talking nice with computers. By nice I mean at all.

Firewire 400 and USB2 are both not working. The drive 'lights up' and sounds as if its working but not mounting on any Windows or Mac. What can I do!?

Unfortunately for me, the drive contains many treasured photos and the like so I'm hoping I can do something to get it back to life.

Thanks for the help!

 

[koobcamuk]

Well, this is my advice.

a) phone the company (WD) if it's in warranty - see what they say

b) phone the supplier (amazon etc) and see what they say (bad batch?)

c) try Disk Warrior

Does nothing appear in disk utility at all?

Does System Profiler spot it?

Good luck.

 

[splashtech]

I had an old WD Passport drive which did a similar thing to this. I wanted/needed my stuff off it so in the end I ripped the housing apart and took the drive out... it is only a standard 2.5" laptop hard drive so recovering the data was as simple as connecting a standard IDE to laptop IDE adapter cable and putting it in a handy desktop and copying off.

In the end it ended up in one of my old laptops as the main system drive, and has been there for a good year or so now with no problems.

The reason it happens is the USB/IDE board dies for some reason. It was not the drive itself at all.

 

[dogtanian]

Aha! I did a re-start and nothing, I did another restart and reset the PRAM etc (I thought it was a long shot) and it now works! I am assuming it was not disconnected properly at some stage perhaps. Not sure how that helped but it certainly did the trick.

 

[splashtech]

Very strange. Glad to hear it wasnt a hardware issue though

 

[dogtanian]

I googled it and seems at least a couple of people have tried it and had it work. I'm also glad it wasn't a hardware problem, the Western Digital site was god-awful and kept telling me my email address was already registered...

 

[pjarvi]

The last MyBook drive I had would go into a coma every 2-3 months. To wake it up, I had to unplug both the firewire cable as well as the power cable then reconnect them. After that it would mount again.

 

[splashtech]

*Looks suspiciously at MyBook on desk and MyBook World Edition II on shelf below router*


*shifty eyes*