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WD - MyBook stopped working, no power or reset button

14K views 22 replies 6 participants last post by  tonyacardo 
#1 · (Edited)
I upgraded to an 8350 AMD processor and to do it I had to disconnect my external drive. When I reconnected the drive, nothing happened. I looked for a power button but did not find one. I also looked for a reset button but could not find one. (I did find a sort of slot that I stuck a pen into but I did not feel any mechanism depress or anything like that when I did it.) (Pen = I opened a ball point pen, took out the barrel of the thing and stuck it inside the slot)

I bought this drive so I have no doubt it was on special at Costco or something like that. Does it even have a reset or power button? All I see is a place for a power cord and the USB.

Also, when I held it in my hand and plugged it in at the same time I did not feel anything. No whirring of a motor, no slight pull to the left or right to indicate the motor is doing anything.

It could still be a power cord but that seems like a stretch.

Do you think it is just dead? I can't remember when I bought it so it must be a couple of years old at the least.

And:
Prior to the CPU upgrade it gave me no problem, none whatsoever.

I know it sounds suspicious but I am pretty sure the CPU did not kill it. The 8350 has no history of violence. It had no motive and I can find no evidence of any CPU wrongdoing.
.................................................
I am creating a new image on another drive, just in case.
 
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#2 ·
Can you try to connect it to a different computer? Just to see if it'll spin up.
If all else fails, and it has long passed the warranty, you can try to remove it from the external case. Then install it in a desktop as a second drive, if that's possible. If not you can carefully remove the existing drive from a laptop, insert this "faulty" drive and see if the Bios will recognize it.
Just be very careful. You can, if unlucky, ruin the laptop.
 
#8 ·
Does it have any kind of light on it to show the power supply is working? I have an real old 500GB one and it has a strip on the front that kind of glows lower and brighter.
 
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#9 ·
No, there are no lights. Just a place to plug in power and a place for the USB. This is the Costco model.

I am still going to rip it open and see if I can get anything back from it
What are the chances of getting anything back from it? Should I even try or am I just adding to my frustration. (speaking of frustration - I had over 30 commercial solicitations from Best Buy and NewEgg and others I bought stuff from over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I had 75 in my inbox from my blog. I can't buy anything or they won't leave me alone. I am in the comfort of my living room, watching a WW2 documentary and these idiots are trying to sell me stuff. This makes me hate them)
 
#10 ·
You had no luck using a Usb socket on the motherboard's connectors at the back then ? How are you supplying the power to it ?

Impossible to say if you will recover anything by dismantling that WD external drive or not, you will just have to try it.

There should a way of opting out of those emails at the various company websites.
 
#11 ·
I need to buy another hard drive. It is used for file storage. I might go internal or external. I don't know. Anyway. For longevity and reliability; is it better to get a 5400 RPM or the 7200 RPM.
I will occasionally watch a movie from this hard drive, so it 5400 enough, or do I need the 7200? To me it seems the faster it turns the easier it is to break.
(also, if I can ever figure out how to stream to my TV, I will stream a movie from my hard disk to my TV, so I doubt there will be much bufferrring ability in the TV, if that makes any difference in the RPM question)

Is there a preferred long term storage Brand. or does that matter? It seems to me that WD and Seagate are the same thing now, but maybe not.

.........
I also bought a new enclosure from Amazon to see if I can get anything off of the dead drive. I expect it is all lost, I had a ton of WWII documentaries on there. I regret losing them.
So reliability, longevity, etc are more important than price, unless there is a big dollar difference. I don't want to pay 2x as much for a drive that will only last a year longer. I will just create a real schedule to back them up and buy new drives every couple of years to switch out when they get close to their expiration dates
 
#13 ·
(also, if I can ever figure out how to stream to my TV, I will stream a movie from my hard disk to my TV
I use several different methods to do this. I use Plex Server on my PC as a media server for my local (home) network. I also have a WD MyCloud device that has a media server built in. Additionally, my Asus router has USB ports that I've got a WD MyBook connected to. I use Roku devices on all my TVs for streaming and play videos on any/all of them. The Roku box in the living room has a USB port that can use a flash drive or external drive with media on it. It's a great setup! So simple to use that my 7 year-old granddaughter has it mastered! ;-)
 
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#12 ·
The RPM of the hard drive doesn't matter for longevity and reliability. The 7200 RPM drives are better if you want high performance which is low latency and high throughput.

To have reliable and longevity is best to do backups or in simpler terms multiple copies of the data.

I recommend the following and a hard drive in it.
Code:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182247
I have an older model and it works just fine. The blue light is irritating bright. Western Digital and Seagate are equal. Personally, I go with Seagate drives because I had a bad experience with Western Digital service. Hopefully, you are not in the same boat if Mybook model automatically encrypts data with out your permission and data recovery will be impossible if it is.

I use gmail and I don't get any of soliciting crap. You can unsubscribe by clicking on a unsubscribe button or link. I don't shop on black Friday and cyber Mondays because I don't want to support neither of these shopping holidays. I think it's wrong to shop on these days for people that work in retail.
 
#14 ·
THanks for the recommendations. I did opt out of all those emails. A few still trickle in but eventually they will stop.
Thanks for the recommendation on the enclosure.

OK, Gr3iz. Come again with that?
(sorry, these could be stupid questions, I don't know what I am doing)

Does your Roku device cost a monthly fee, or is it a one-and-done deal? Does the Roku device cause my computer to recognize the TV as a seperate monitor. So I could compute on my PC monitor, and watch movies on the TV at the same time. What about Codecs, would my computer be the one with the codecs so the Roku could play a video in pretty much any format (avi, mp3, mkv, etc) as long as the proper codec was on my computer. Or would there be translation problems?
(right now I can plug in a flash drive and play movies but they need to be in AVI format or it will not work, that is from my DVD player)
Roku would play all my WW2 documentaries from the hard drive? So it would not need to be Roku provided movies, it would play mine too.
(If I cannot revive this drive I will have lost some of them, but the best ones were backed up on another drive, so it is not a complete loss)

A guy in the store told me that if I cannot get my computer to recognize my TV as a seperate monitor, I would not be able to send that app to the TV only. I would have to leave it open on my computer too. Thus making computing impossible. If I minimized the streaming program computer apparently it would also be minimized on the TV too.
But again, I don't know what is going on, so I may have heard incorrectly or he may be wrong, or any number of things could have went wrong when I was hearing him.
 
#15 ·
The Roku devices are a one-time purchase. They offer Roku-Sticks that are Wi-Fi only devices that are a bit larger than a flash drive. They plug into an HDMI port on the TV and are powered by USB (either from the TV itself or with an external 5v power supply provided). There's also a Roku settop box (about 4" x 4"x 1") that can use Wi-Fi or wired Ethernet. I use the Ethernet connection for better speed. They connect to your home network. They are streaming devices, not directly connected to your PC. In addition to your local programming (stuff from your HDD), you can use services like Sling or Hulu to view "cable channels", other services that provide hundreds of other (mostly free) "channels" and music services (Pandora, IHeartRadio, SiriusXM, etc.).
To play local content (from your HDD, for example), you'd need a media server of some sort. As I said above, you can use something like Plex, which uses your PC as a media server, or maybe your router has USB ports that allow its use as a media server. I also have a WD MyCloud external drive that has a media server built in.
Video needs to be in either .mkv or .mp4 format. (I've used Handbrake to convert my videos from .avi to .mkv when necessary.) I've used audio in both .mp3 and .flac formats. You can also view photos in .jpg format.
This does not use your TV as a monitor. You are free to watch TV while using your computer and way you want. I'm doing that right now!
 
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#16 ·
THank you. MP4 and mkv are pretty popular formats. So that will cove about 90% of everything. The rest I can convert with AVC
My router has USB ports but I don't know if they work that way. It looks like I am going to need a media server too.
Most importantly, with the server i can compute and watch the TV too?

Thanks for all this effort. Thanks to everyone really.
 
#18 · (Edited)
It says Netgear R6100.
It has only 1 USB port. that I can see.

I have a formatting question. (somehow I have 2 threads crossed or something, so I have 2 topics on one thread now, sorry about that, it is my fault)
Anyway
I have news on my dead drive. I bought an enclosure off of Amazon. I cracked open the HP case and pulled out the drive. I put the drive in the enclosure and it spun up. I then attached a USB cable to it and the computer recognized it.
So I guess I killed a power connection of some sort in the WD MyBook case.
Anyway, it fires up and connects
BUT
It says I need to format the drive before I can use it. If I format I lose all my files. I don't want that.
Originally, that drive was labeled K: but the computer is now calling it G:
So I went into AOMEI Partition and renamed the drive K:
AOMEI also says that most of the drive is now Unallocated, about 3.1 TB. The other 500 GB shows color, so AOMEI thinks there is data on it (I guess).
Anyway, I tried to Merge the 2 and AOMEI would not allow it. It says I cannot merge a FAT32 and an NFTS or something like that. I don't know what all this means. but when I tried to merge the 2 together, it would not do it. the "continue" button never illuminated/became visible so it would not work.
Anyway, I don't even know if merging was a good idea or not, so it is probably better that way.
I also tried clicking the G drive, going to Properties, selecting Tools, and doing a disk check but it won't do anything unless it is formatted.
I don't know any more tricks to try, I really hope someone else does. I would like to retrieve those files if possible.
 
#19 ·
That router does include a media server. Once you get a working external drive, you will be able to stream movies/music/photos to a device, like a Roku. Your PC will not be involved at all. You will be able to use it fully while streaming to your TV.
I think your thread just kinda branched. I responded to the media question part while others were helping you with the drive issues.
 
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#20 ·
Thank you Gr3iz.
What exactly do I need. Do I simply plug an external hard drive in and that is it. I have 3 Externals available to me now. The bad external was just my main storage. it is where all the stuff I have already seen gets stored. I have other docs available on the other hard drives. Because they are yet unseen, they were not moved and so they were not lost.

Anyway, once I plug in the drive, the TV will just know it is there or do I need configure this somehow.

Thank you

and I hope somebody has an idea on that hard drive that failed, was brought back to lfe, but it still crippled by access issues.
 
#21 ·
Once you connect it to the router, you may need to log in and set it up. Not having that make/model, it may be a bit different than mine.
Then, you'll need something like a Roku to connect to your TV. I'm only familiar with Roku. I don't know if Amazon's FireStick works the same way. There are other streaming devices that may also work.
 
#22 ·
Roku boxes are streaming devices that turn a dumb TV into a smart TV. They are another way to view video and hear audio content besides using a computer. The one problem with Roku boxes is the video and audio have to be encoded that is compatible with Roku hardware. If you don't, the Roku box will not play it. Running something like Plex will format the video and audio to make it compatible to play on a Roku box. A computer running Plex requires a powerful computer in order for transcoding the video into compatible formats that your streaming boxes support. Usually, people run Plex in another room that they are OK with the noise. In addition, for the best performance and reliability, it requires a wired network connection, not a wireless connection.

The MKV and MP4 are not file formats. They are containers. What Roku requires is the video encoded into h.264. The following explains what formats are compatible and how to playback content on Roku.
Code:
https://support.roku.com/article/208754908-how-do-i-use-roku-media-player-to-play-my-videos-music-and-photos-
I recommend read the router's manual. Your questions will be answered by reading the manual.

About your hard drive issue. From what read your hard drive that was in the Western Digital Mybook is OK, but the data is history. You can thank Western Digital for that because they didn't mention that data will be encrypted without your permission. You can try to go to a data recovery service that knows how to extract data from a MyBook. Changing the drive letter won't fix problems. Good thing that it had conflict merging FAT and NTFS together because that will lose your data. Your drive is encrypted. Without the keys, decrypting your files are history unless you get the keys. Again data recovery service that knows how to extract from a Mybook should be used.
 
#23 ·
I contacted these folks today:
https://www.filesaversdatarecovery.com

He gave me a ballpark figure of $1000 dollars to retrieve a 4 GB drive.

I like my WW2 docs but not anywhere close to 1000 dollars worth. To be honest for 100 dollars I might not have even done it.
I guess I will need to get myself a schedule of when to replace drives, so they don't fail on me and it is too late.

One last thing:
Does Seagate also encrypt everything?

I would like to get storage that is not encrypted.

I am thinking something like this:
https://www.costco.com/Seagate-Back...Data-Recovery-Services.product.100458004.html

If it has 2 USB ports, could I plug one into my computer and the other into my Netgear Router, it will act like server if I attach a hard drive to it.

THanks for all your help and patience
 
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