Western Digital My Book External Hard Drive & Acronis True Image

I know how frustrating it is first-hand not to be able to get these things to work. I am very happy to hear that all is now well with your external hard drive.

Have you tried removing the current primary drive and rebooting only with the "second internal HDD" in the pc? How does your pc determine the master/slave relationship between your hard drives? Is this determined by location on the ribbon cable or by jumper pins (located on each drive)? My old and new internal drives are SATA and connect to motherboard connectors labelled SATA 0 and SATA 1. I believe in my pc the master/slave relationship is determined by their connection to the motherboard. I believe the drive connected to the SATA 0 motherboard connector is the master drive, and the drive connected to SATA 1 is the slave drive. I could be wrong about this, but I think I am right. You need to tell your pc through connection order, connection location, or jumper pin placement that you want to boot from the 2nd drive. Like I said, you may want to try removing the 1st drive and see if the pc will then boot from the 2nd drive.

I am not sure, but if you do not have a TI rescue book disk that is current enough to recognize your backup images during a crisis, you may not be able to restore your image to your hard drive. Because of this you should burn a new up-to-date TI Rescue bootable disk today! It's not worth taking the chance that you will need this updated bootable disk and not have it. This is especially true when you are touching the inside of your pc, moving drives around, and trying all these new things. You'll kick yourself, if you don't make the disk now if something goes wrong later.

My WD My Book 250GB external drive also came formatted as FAT32 as one partition (I reformatted it to NTFS). The WD instructions gave me install instructions, which in part said that I could not, until I completed installation, use the drive with the FireWire 400 port. Although WD wanted to install a backup program and Google Desktop, I only let WD install the WD Button Manager and the FireWire driver. To my knowledge (which could be based on trial-and-error lack of correct recollection), I needed to the Button Manager and WD FireWire driver installed. Since the WD My Book drive contained the files WD wanted to install, the My book WAS recognized by my PC through a USB connection before the installation. I wonder if it is possible that the files WD installed were needed only for my pc to recognize the My Book when it was connected with the FireWire.

Again congratulations on your success!!

 

GroverH,

Thank you for correcting my post. In my post, I confused creating a TI image directly to DVD (where smaller image file splitting sizes are recommended) and creating a TI image to an external hard drive with the intension of later burning the saved image to DVD (where image file splitting sizes are recommended to to 650MB or 700MB, depending on the capacity of the DVD disk the user will later burn a copy of the image to).

Thank you again for your correction. It is hard enough to get PCs to do everything they are supposed to do.

 

cliffg,

I am glad to hear that you have been able to get your My Book to work with a boot CD. I have seen forum posts mention the BartPE boot CD, and I included this plugin during my TI 9.0 install, but I have not yet gone any further to learn more about BartPE. One day I will do more reading on BartPE, as it sounds like a very useful tool.

 

Nosmas,
You might want to check the options offered by your BIOS settings.

Within my Bios, I have an "advanced Bios Features" menu option.
Within that menu, there is "Hard Disk Priority" option.
Within this "hard disk priority" menu, each of my bootable drives are listed and I can choose which is to be the boot drive.

 

Don't wish to appear pedantic but the 2GB file size limit is an ISO 9660 constraint (e.g. when burning a DVD-ROM (ISO) compilation). FAT32 has a 4GB max file size limitation.

Regards

 

Thanks to Menorcaman for correcting the important details. It's the little errors or mis-understandings that sometimes cause all the problems.Thanks.

 

Is anybody still on this thread? I have a similar problem. Bought a My Book, (essential I think) 160gb, hooked it up to laptop, Averatec, 40 gb hard drive, Windows XP home , changed it to NTFS, made 4 partitions, backed up info, took it downstairs, backed up stuff on wife's desktop, also XP, put it on a shelf, took it out 3 days later and the thing won't even light up (the circle light around the power button. Tried leaving it attached and re-booting, today tried plugging it in with the laptop already booted, but the USB cable NOT attached, and nothing happens. No light, no spin, no noise. Did check to see that 12 volts is coming thru the power supply. Help!!!

Just another thought, what if I took this thing back to Best Buy, traded it in, and someone took it and figured out how to make it work, they would have all my info.

Thanks

 

Does the light come on or does it spin up at all when you plug the drive into the wall and just press the button on the My Book drive? Just in case you do not know, the button I am referring to is on the front of the drive inside the inner blue lighted circle. I know you said that it did not turn on when hooked up to the computers, but can you manually turn it on for a very a few seconds by pressing the My Book power button?

 

Thanks for responding, nope, no light, at all, even pressing it for 20 seconds. The guys at Western Digital think it's a problem with the power management settings, or in the Bios (not recognizing a USB port) and want me to contact Averatec, the laptop maker. Took the first one back to Best Buy and got to watch someone smash it. The new one fired right up and worked well, but after sitting for an hour, (never unplugged or turned off) went off, never to be heard of again (ie no light, no spin). Help!!!!!!

 

Wow. Sometimes my My Book would not stay on for long when I pressed the button if my PC was not on, but pressing the button a second time resulted in the My Book staying on. I really do not know what is happening in your situation.

If I am reading your post correctly, the My Book you initially wrote about was the one you returned and the store smashed. The second one is the one you brought home and it only worked for an hour (during which you were able to use the My Book), then it stopped working.

I absolutely have no suggestions other than to contact Western Digital again with the additional information you now have after getting the 2nd MyBook. Since two units died after a short amount of useage, I can only imagine that the MyBook is getting negatively impacted when connected to your computers. Another possibility is that the My Book is getting damaged some how (maybe from where you are placing it or how you are handling it). I really do not know, but I am just throwing some things out to you. You could also ask Western Digital if they can look at the drive for you to verify what went wrong. If the drive never worked, that is one thing. But since it did work and then stopped working, something happened to it while it was in your possession.

One last thought. I have a digital camera. I once formated the camera's card with my PC. I also deleted pictures on the card with my PC. After doing these things, my camera started giving me problems. I had to have the camera fixed by the manufacturer. I was then told to never format or change the card's contents with the PC. That, if I did, I could damage the camera's programing (or something like that). After that, when taking pictures, I put a copy of the pictures on my computer (instead of moving the pictures), and I only deleted the picture from the card with the camera. After changing my methods, I never had a problem with the camera again. What I am getting at is that maybe there is something on one of your PC's that is conflicting with the MyBook drives. Maybe what is important is the exactly what you did to each MyBook drive just before the drives stopped working. Just a thought.

 

see new thread

 

This wouldn't surprise me if you have other USB devices plugged into your computer. The USB ports are not all independent but are on internal hubs. If two devices that conflict in any way are on the same internal hub, one or both is likely not to work. Moving to a different port that is on a different internal hub separates the two and both will then work.

I'm glad to hear that you are now getting the sort of performance and ease of use from your MyBook that you expected.

I have found one other oddity about MyBooks. After being attached for a while and working perfectly, they may not be recognized when you boot up. The problem is that the WD automatic shut down and start up fails to start the drive. The only solution that I have found is to disconnect the power cable from the MyBook, wait 10 seconds and reconnect it. Rebooting the drive allows Windows to recognize it.

 

THANK YOU SOOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH

I'll post a link to this on the 100 some forums I saw where people are all wondering what to do with their new MyBook which let them down after a couple days, or even hours.

Julien

 

Julien,

Thank you so much for your post. I am glad that you found my posting helpful. I have gotten alot of help from members of this forum and was more than happy to share my experience and suggestions with everyone.

 

Ditto to you. I too have the same external drives, and they just stay connected and "on" 24/7. I like it that way because for me, it's perfect. When I turn my computer on, they come on. And when I turn my pc off, they spin down. What more could you ask for?

 

If you're going to leave them on 24/7, I hope you have them well protected via some quality UPS with a good surge ratio. Hopefully, your backups also exist on some other device--not connected.

 

Having seen the results of a local lightning strike I am in total agreement with the above sentiments.
Apart from the house that suffered the direct strike and had three PCs completely fried half a dozen other houses over distance of 3/4 of a mile had various degrees of damage and loss of data.
The strike entered the premises via the mains supply and also via the telephone lines.
I believe that any kit that is connected and switched on is at risk to such damage. I would not put my trust in surge protectors whatever the advertising says. Lightning, which travels thousands of feet through the air, just laughs at these puny devices.
So I keep my back up drives in removable caddies. Only one is in the computer at any one time. The others are not connected to anything and are physically separated from the PC.

Xpilot

 

Your point is and should be very well taken. I do(emphasis) have ups protection in the form of an APC Back-UPS Pro 1100. Also, the Law of the house is whenever someone is home and there's lightning nearby or our electric company(Cleco) nearby, EVERYTHING in the house gets unplugged. I've been an appliance repairman/part time electrician for many years. I go to two or three houses a month that's been hit by some sort of power surge, so I know the dangers of leaving things on or plugged in. But I have other things on different partitions on the externals that I use everyday. That's why I never turn them "off", so to speak.