I've had a 500GB WD MyBook for a couple of years now and never had any serious problems. Once or twice before I've had a delayed write error which I fixed by restarting the computer. Last night I got that error so I turned off my computer thinking I would finish this afternoon, except when I turned on my computer today, the external drive doesn't work anymore. On my XP machine it thinks its a local HDD and on my Win2k machine it says its a removable disk (which it is, but it should show up as MyBook (J). On both computers I get a "K:\is no accessible Error performing inpage operation" error when I try to access the drive and the drive itself sounds like it reads/spins slower than it used to. Any ideas on what is wrong and how to fix it? Thanks for your help.
Could be a faulty drive, but it could just be a faulty power supply to the unit, can you try putting the hard disk inside your PC?
Not sure how easy it will be to dissemble the MyBook, but I agree on that being the best course of action. I was hoping there was a simpler solution because I have finals next week so I won't have much time to work on it. What do you think the chances of data loss are? There was about 400GB on it and some of it could be really hard to replace. As always, thanks for your help sammorris.
Well, I got the drive out and put it in my computer which confirmed the worst, it really has gone bad. Now I need to look into data recovery and see if its feasible or not. I'll need another external HDD, any suggestions? I'm thinking that I might just get an external enclosure rather than pre-manufactured HDD. Thanks.
I am another who swears by the DIY external enclosure, approach to externals. I am also one who ALWAYS clicks on the safe removal icon, in the tray, prior to switching the external unit to off.
I also do DIY, but the drive was a gift. I usually backup important data, I just didn't expect the drive to fail with a maximum of 2.5 years of use. I think I'll get a couple seagate drives to replace the dead WD. Hopefully they'll last longer than the warranty.
I don't trust any hard drive enough to have just one copy of the data. I always keep a spare drive and copy any changes to both; in fact i only use external drives as a backup of the internal drives, my logic being that the external copy drive is only very rarely used (ie for copying changes to). plus i keep cd's for really important stuff (as well as the 2 hard drives).
It can happen with any drive. I put Seagate, Samsung and WD all on a good par with expected lifetime for drives. Hitachi and Maxtor seem to do a bit worse based on what I hear, but if you for any of the former 3, you should be fine - it all boils down to luck really.
