i spent way too many hours yesterday 'troubleshooting' my external harddrive. i had a western digital 750meg my book external harddrive and it suddenly started whining and then the music i was playing from started stuttering. after disconnecting it and reconnecting, it said 'connecting to xnas0rubfasdf", or something like that, and locked up again. finally, i could get it to recognize the drive in the usb port but it wouldnt show on my file manager. some diagnostics showed that the cable was bad.. not that i believed that. i got a new one and nope, as i thought. that wasnt the problem. its past its warranty so i'm gonna take it out and see if i can get it to work as an internal drive.
this is my 2nd WD drive in the past year that has failed. the first one failed and this was the replacement that failed. anyone else have any experience with external HDD?
Posted by SOLEMAN 13 (Member # 33699) on :
Go inside the external box and check all your connections. After that power it back up and listen for sounds i.e. platters whirring or any clicking sound. If you hear it running (platters whirring) it should show up...if not, try ext. on another computer, or as you said, try as an internal.
A better place to have posted this question would be at Craigslist on the Computer (COMP) Forum (not the buy and sell but the 'Discussion Area'); you would have had 5 or 10 answers within a half hour.
Posted by diamond johny (Member # 27586) on :
I always have 2 identical externals & backup everything with SuperDuper.
Posted by goodguyneighbor (Member # 2824) on :
I had a Western Digital "My Book" drive that failed the same way. I think they were having problems a while back because I know another producer who that also happened to.
WD sent me a new drive for free which has been running fine for a couple years now.
The key here to this lesson is that all hard drives will eventually fail. Make sure you configure your new drives RAID, so all data is mirrored in the inevitable event of failure. Then at least it's unlikely that both halves will die at the same time.