Western Digital External HD - Tech Support Forums

ajkeence99 · July 9th, 2008, 08:01 PM

I looked around and couldn't find a problem that matched mine so I apologize if I am posting a duplicate question.Here is my issue:I have a 500GB Western Digital My Book with firewire and USB2 connections. I've had it connected to my laptop the last couple of weeks because I have been converting all of my movies to MPEG-4 to play on my PS3. Anyway, it was working fine on both the PS3 and my laptop. I was moving some converted movies from the laptop to the hard drive and decided I would change the attributes on the Autoplay (or Autorun, I forget exactly what it was named) and the WD Tools folder to hidden just expecting them to not show up without enabling the view of hidden files. Afterwards, everything was fine until I restarted the laptop and since then the hard drive won't work on any computer. It will make the little noise on Windows XP when you plug a PnP device in and shows up in device manager but doesn't show up in My Computer. On occasion it will show up as Local Disk instead of My Book like it should but will not allow me to access it.This would normally lead me to believe that the disk died but the kicker is that on my PS3 it works perfectly fine. I can watch any of the movies and everything that are on it and it works as though nothing ever changed. I have to assume it has something to do with me changing the attributes on the autoplay/run folder to hidden but I am unsure of how I will be able to change it if I am not able to access it on a computer now. The autoplay/run folder shows up on the PS3 in case anyone was wondering that.Any suggestions?

BipolarBill · July 10th, 2008, 08:51 AM

Right click My Computer and select Manage. Open Disk Management on the left and assign the WD drive a higher letter - like W.

ajkeence99 · July 19th, 2008, 07:07 PM

I tried that an am able to change the drive letter but it is showing the Hard Drive as have 100% free space, which obviously isn't the case because the PS3 still reads it just fine. Think there could be something physically wrong with it possibly?

BipolarBill · July 19th, 2008, 07:12 PM

You can actually open the drive in My Computer?

ajkeence99 · July 19th, 2008, 07:20 PM

I can see it in device manager and in disk management as you suggested and even change the drive letter. It shows up in my computer sometimes as local disk but if I try to open it, "my computer" hangs up until I unplug the hard drive and then it works fine again.

BipolarBill · July 19th, 2008, 07:27 PM

My guess is that the drive is failing. I would plan on replacing it very soon.

ajkeence99 · July 19th, 2008, 07:40 PM

I was beginning to think the same thing. Just want to find a way to be able to get all of the information off. When I return to the US I plan on pulling the drive from the casing and installing it on my PC to see if it will work there to get my data off and transfer it to a new external, probably a TB this time.