One from Maxtor failed completely, rendering any drive mounted in it non-responsive, and other enclosures from a generic CompUSA enclosure, to one of my WD Books have failed in similar fashion as well. Of the drives that I own, every external enclosure from every vendor has failed at one time or another.
Since I’m somewhat of a “veteran” external drive user, having about 4 terabytes on hand, I thought I’d add my two cents to this thread.Īnytime your PC shuts down abnormally, the external drives take a beating. Thanks to this blog, I was able to take it apart tonight and mount it in a new machine.
The newer one crashed, taking 500GB of data with it, and Windows was no longer able to even format the disk. I have two My Books, one is the newer triple interface (Firewire 800 etc), the other is the older double interface (USB 2.0 + Firewire). Thank you Scott and all of you so much for posting here it’s really been helpful. Note – over 350 gig of data takes a while to transfer.įor the curious, all pics were taken with my Verizon LG8000 cellphone and quickly edited in Photoshop. I attached my new MyBook and moved everything over. After this everything showed up fine – there was ALL my pretty data. Okay, I didn’t know to do this right off – the drive just didn’t show up and after scratching my head for a few minutes I rebooted and checked setup. (7) On my DELL Optiplex I had to go into setup when the computer started and enable the second SATA drive. If you are unfamiliar with all this, just look at how the main drive is hooked up – it’s not rocket science. I still needed a SATA cable so I “borrowed” one from another office computer to connect the drive to the motherboard. I happened to have a DELL Optiplex in the office that uses SATA drives so I opened it up and hooked the second power connector coming off the main drive to my newly freed MyBook drive. This is a SATA hard drive and can be hooked up to a desktop computer (that accepts SATA drives) or I’ve seen adaptors on the ‘net that you can plug into a SATA drive to turn it into a regular IDE drive (not exactly something most people have laying about though). Unplug the connector attached to the drive. (6) Peel back the foil tape so that you can access the power and data connector on the drive. Remove the three screws holding it on and gently unplug it from it’s connection on the drive unit. (5) There is a small circuit board attached for the LED power light that you need to remove to make the drive easier to get out of the case. (4) Remove four screws securing the drive unit to the inner case. When you’re doing it, you’ll see what I’m talking about. I had to use my fingernails and pry the edges of the solid black case away from the drive unit and just keep carefully working at it until I could get it to start coming apart.
In truth, easier said than done so don’t cuss me out when you try it. Be careful not to push in too far and break the “catches” off. On my drive, I used a flat-head screwdriver to push one side in and a little to the side to lodge it just a little under the plastic case so it would stop popping back up again. It may be tricky getting both sides pressed in at the same time to slide off the case. See the next picture for a clear view of the “catches” with the case off. (2) On both the top and bottom of the drive there are plastic “catches” that must be pressed in to allow you to slide the outer case off the drive. Remove this sticker (mine was more like black paint that chipped off) and remove this screw. (1) There is a black sticker covering one screw securing the case. Click any of the images for a larger image. Here’s what I was looking for on the ‘net and did not find. After a little more research and some playing I did manage to disassemble the MyBook, recover my data, and return it to Western Digital (as pristine as possible so hopefully I did not obviously void any warranties – which would be ridiculous since I just wanted *MY* data back from *THEIR* broken drive). After reading a bit on the ‘net, common opinion was the power or USB on the MyBook was likely the cause – that these elements were not as robust as the drive itself. Western Digital sent me a replacement drive but told me that my data was lost unless I wanted to talk to their data recovery department and that it would most likely be costly. Horror! Of course I didn’t have everything backed up – time to start saving money for a second 500 gig drive I guess. One day I hooked it up to my computer and it would not power up (for the purposes of this post, the background as to why it might not boot up is irrelevant -)). I have a 500 gig Western digital MyBook external drive.