Yup: the WD My Books are flaky.
As with yours, my WD external drive does not mount to my desktop, but
I have a G4 iBook 1.33, OSX 10.4.11.
I posted my problemo over on the LEM G4 'Books List.
I opened the box, plugged 'er in, the drive mounted. I installed the
software, and it was fine.
Did a backup, dragged-and dropped, etc.
On my iBook I deleted the files I had transferred to the drive.
On Dec 30 I plugged the My Book back in to the computer, and it simply
didn't show up on the desktop.
The cables are solidly connected, the the disk is spinning, but the
light is not moving in the My Book.
I went to wdc.com, registered the drive, and have now been in a two-
week email conversation to examine what could be wrong with "Pedro D"
of WD tech support.
I also shlepped it down to Macworld to get the guys in the WD booth to
give it a go. (It didn't mount on their iMac running Leopard, either.)
My original connection was via Firewire.
I tried a usb connection as well.
No go.
Howard Katz from over on the G4 List solved his problem: he has the
drive daisy-chained via firewire to another drive. He turned that one
on and then turned on the WD. He reports it's still up and running.
WD will send you a new drive, but they will not retrieve or reimburse
for retrieval of the info on the drive which will not mount.
If you want to know my exact correspondence with the WD guy, I can
send to you.
If you find a solution as to why your drive doesn't mount, *please*
let me know as well!
When the drive won't mount, it won't be seen by the system at all --
not in disk utility, not on startup, etc.
It's just not "there."
I just would like to get my data off of it and onto a safe drive,
which I thought this was!
Here's a thought:
Did you download the Mac software? Did you reformat for Mac? It comes
preformatted for PC.
Also see here below for the WD Knowledgebase reference to run it on
both PC and Mac.
Here is the relevant part from the User Manual:
"Troubleshooting
WD Knowledgebase Answer ID
install, partition, and format the drive in Windows XP -- 207
install, partition, and format the drive in Windows 2000 -- 34
format the drive to Mac OS format -- 287
obtain and reinstall the original software included on My Book --
1425
format the drive to the FAT32 file system** -- 1364
use the drive on a Macintosh and a PC simultaneously -- 291
"If you have problems when installing or using this product, refer to
this troubleshooting section or visit our support Web site at
support.wdc.com and search our knowledge base for more help.
"**This WD drive is preformatted as a single FAT32 partition for
compatibility with all Mac and Windows operating systems. The FAT32
file system has a maximum individual file size of 4 GB and cannot
create partitions larger than 32 GB in Windows 2000/XP; however,
Windows 2000/XP users can overcome these file size limitations by
reformatting the drive to NTFS using the Disk Management utility.
See answer ID 1287 at support.wdc.com and article IDs 314463 and
184006 at support.microsoft.com for further details."
-Judy B
> >> --- On Mon, 1/12/09, Bruce Johnson <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> >> WD's external drives (the MyBook ones at least) are notoriously flaky.
> > On Jan 12, 10:51 am, Stan Michael <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> >> Grabbed a 640GB MyBook on black Friday and it works nice on my pc at work,
> >> but won't show up on the Pismo. I thought it was because I was trying to
> >> get it to work on the non 2.0 USB port. It should still work then? Will
> >> it work on XP but not on OSX?
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