WD external HD recognised as

amrius13 · 30 Oct 2011

Hi everybody,

I have a weird situation on an w7 x64 OS. I have 2 Western Digital My book essential external hard disk (1TB each) and they are not both correctly recognised by the OS. They are both detected but one of them is recognised as CD Drive.

I have another 2 internal hard disk - one is partitioned in 2 partitions (C & D), the other has one single partition (E). One of the external HD is correctly recognised as HDD (letter assigned J), but the other external HDD (which has 2 partitions - H & I) is recognised as CD Drive - please see attached screenshot.

It is not a problem related to formatting as both external HDD have been formatted in NTFS. Actually, if I disconnect the external drive that is correctly assigned (J), the other external HDD becomes available as HDD with both its partitions.

Please advise if it has to do with letter assignment or w7 has a maximum no. of partitions recognised as HDD?

TKS.

seavixen32 · 30 Oct 2011

Welcome to Windows Seven Forums.

Please post a screenshot of your Disk Management layout so that we can see how your partitions are configured.

You can have up to four primary partitions on each hard drive, and then create logical partitions within the fourth primary partition if you need more.

As for your WD external drives, you could try changing their drive letters to say, X and Y, so that they are well away from your internal hard drives.

amrius13 · 30 Oct 2011

Hi, thanks for reply. Changing the drive letters doesn't help.
I attach a print scr. from the disk management page.

SledgeDG · 30 Oct 2011

it's not about any drive letter limit it goes from A to Z (beginning with C for harddrives)
I would say only one drive is recognized. Unplug them and try to plug them back in, in the opposite order one at a time.

BTW: Did you ever open one of those "CD drives" to see what's in there?
It has( amongst others) a file called "What is this.html" which starts out like this:

About the Western Digital® SmartWare™ Virtual CD

The WD SmartWare Virtual CD (VCD) included on your WD hard drive mimics an ordinary physical CD that is indistinguishable to your hard drive. The WD SmartWare VCD contains the software you need to start using the WD SmartWare software to organize, back up, retrieve, and secure your files as well as other essential information, and has the additional benefit of avoiding wear and tear, damage, or loss of a physical CD.

In addition, updates to the WD SmartWare VCD, when available, are automatically downloaded from the web to your drive so you don’t have to wait for the arrival of a physical replacement CD.

-DG

Edit: Oh we cross-posted :) you just posted the screen print and see drive 2 is shown as offline
try the replugging (directly into the computer if you can)
-DG

amrius13 · 30 Oct 2011

Hi, on the "false CD Drives" there is the file you mentioned.

However I managed to get the external HDD online by right clicking it - so this has fixed the problem, everything is showing as it should except the 2 WD CD drives which are still present in My Computer drives list. However this is not actually an issue, as I managed to get the 2 external drives to work simultaneously. Thanks a lot for help !