[JayC]

I need some help and/or direction. My desktop is XP and on my LAN I have a Western Digital MyBook World Edition 500GB drive. One of those "self contained" servers that can be used for backups.

MyBook is connected and runs 24/7 and was last used 3 or 4 days ago. Two days ago I found that it could not be found on my LAN, so I cold booted it with no success. I tried reseating the LAN cable with no success, then left it alone. Yesterday I began to be concerned that this may not be a minor issue.

The drive sounds healthy (no abnormal noises). The box's blue status light never comes on. The LAN port's LED never gets to green -- just blinks yellow. Listening carefully to a cold boot it sounds like it is doing fine, but then sounds like it gets stuck trying to read an unreadable sector and keeps trying to re-read.

I took the bare-bones drive out of it's housing and found it to be a 500GB WD Caviar Blue SATA drive. I plugged it into my desktop and the desktop BIOS can read it's label, but when the desktop boots it does not show the drive.

What should I do next?

- Jay

 

[Cougarman]

Sounds like a bad drive if your PC/bios doesn't see it. FWIW, we tried one of these on our LAN too a few years ago. We had terrible luck and ended up returning the unit to place of purchase. Gave up on the whole idea.

 

[JayC]

Cougarman,

The BIOS does see it, and reports the correct drive model. But after bootup, the HDD doesn't show up as a drive. Maybe because two different format structures (XP vs ___)? I think I had read somewhere that these units are really and old Windows NT server version operating on top of a HDD. So maybe Windows NT doesn't undertand it if I throw in into my XP desktop?

I don't know what to do next.

- Jay

 

[Cougarman]

Oh, I was reading too fast - I see now that you said it can.

Anyway, there isn't a mysterious NT file system. There is FAT, FAT32, NTFS formatting. NT was NTFS. 2000 and XP are NTFS as well. 2000 came out with an "enhanced" version of NTFS, but the XP machines can use the old NT style NTFS format. Even if the Worldbook is FAT32, all will be compatible. If you slave a drive on a PC or install one as a second disk, you should still be able to read it - even if it has NT Server or whatever installed on it.

...hmmm, just re-read your last entry. I'm confused about how you're connecting this drive. Do you have it connected on the LAN via ethernet cable, or are you using it as a USB drive and directly connecting to the PC??

 

[JayC]

Thanks for the info. Original packaging was a "box" which connected to my LAN and was an IP port.

After my problem cropped up, I took the bare HDD out of the box and found it to be a SATA, so I used SATA cables and installed it as drive2 in my desktop. That's how I found that BIOS saw and correctly identified the HDD.

But a Windows XP bootup does not show the newly added HDD as a drive letter. That's where my understanding is a little fuzzy. I wasn't sure if XP would recognize a file format that wasn't the same as it's own.

 

[Cougarman]

OK, understood.
Ours was LAN as well. I seem to recall we plugged it in, powered up, and it went to dhcp. I was able to go to the dhcp server and see what address was given to the unit. I was able to type that address in a browser and get to its management (html) page. Once there, I could assign a static address (which is best) and manage the needed settings. As I said before, we gave up on it because it was not very happy on our network. My boss is recalling it would lose the address setting, and I recall we had trouble w/ Window's Master Browser. Anyway...


Is this at home for you or in an office situation? Do you have dhcp? Some dhcp is handed out from the router, which you should be able to get to its management page and see what's happening there like I did. Then be able to manage the Mybook like I mentioned.

Overall, I'd say you're having trouble similar to mine where it worked for a while and then was an intermittent problem. Or, from your testing results, you have a working harddisk, but there's something about the Mybook itself...either the network card is now bad (You say the LAN light is only yellow and never goes green), or the OS got hosed. Something there.

 

[JayC]

Cougarman,

What you state about DHCP and how the unit is supposed to work is the way it has been working for a year or so. No problems. I did not want it to be DHCP, so it picked up an IP address from a different DHCP unit. This setup is at home; my son bought it for me last year.

Like I said this unit has been plugged it, connected to the LAN and has been running 24/7. The only problem I have had all this year is that all of a sudden, it no longer appeared on my LAN and it's LAN LED never progresses to green. Maybe the OS got clobbered, but I suspect that either a sector cannot be read and this information will not be reported to my PC, or there is a hardware issue. If a hardware issue, I was hoping that I could plug the bare HDD into my desktop and transfer data off the HDD. But to do this transfer, I need some direction from anyone on how to make the HDD work inside my desktop XP PC.

Thanks,
Jay

 

[Cougarman]

... If a hardware issue, I was hoping that I could plug the bare HDD into my desktop and transfer data off the HDD. But to do this transfer, I need some direction from anyone on how to make the HDD work inside my desktop XP PC.

Thanks,
Jay

Ah, so this is the crux of it. If I don't answer it, I hope someone will chime in.

Here's a link I discovered via wikipedia for a guy who had the same trouble as you. Seems that the bottom line is enabling a 2nd drive in BIOS.

http://www.ransackery.com/western-digital-mybook-open-case-recover-data.htm

Best Of Luck!