Problem with hard drive WD20EARX

trancedellic · 20 Jan 2014

I had for like an year an external drive, WD My Book Essential 2tb. Couple of days ago I opened it and connected the hard drive to SATA.
Windows didn't detect it and I initialized the disk. I tried to recover some information but no success. While I did this for over 12 hours I had no problem.

Now, I after I try to copy something on it , after like 5 minutes, the drive disappears. Windows can't see it. Other programs can't see it either. I need to restart the PC in order to have access.

I can't find a solution. I have the power option turned off for hdd but that's it.

Any ideas?

archer · 20 Jan 2014

Hi trancedellic,

Right click on my computer
Choose MANAGE
Then find DISK MANAGEMENT
You should see your ext hard drive under the list.
Right click on it, and choose CHANGE DRIVE LETTER
Choose anything, but I recommend something higher than M:

I've seen this problem with alot of STORAGE DEVICE

You can also check out this article for more help

trancedellic · 20 Jan 2014

I will try. Like I said my external drive is not external now. I installed it inside the case. Before that I connected it to USB 3 or 2 and had no problems with it.

Also, what is best, to have one partition or should I make more?

archer · 20 Jan 2014

trancedellic said:

I will try. Like I said my external drive is not external now. I installed it inside the case. Before that I connected it to USB 3 or 2 and had no problems with it.

Also, what is best, to have one partition or should I make more?

Above method implies to both internal and external drives. :)

If you are using 2TB HDD, then I will suggest to have atleast one partition in the drive.

trancedellic · 20 Jan 2014

I have tried with one big partition. Now I split the drive in two partitions. I will change the drive letters for both of them to see what happens.

Edit: I started copying some movies one by one. Was ok. Then I marked 3 movies and after few minutes, the drive disappeared again.

I checked events and I have an error event like 9 times, all same time:

The device, \Device\Harddisk1\DR1, is not ready for access yet.

And right after that, an warning event, same time, same event like 100 times:

An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\DR1 during a paging operation.

I just found an alternative. If I go to device manager and refresh for new hardware, the drive appears and there is no need for restart.

Hope any of this info helps.

TVeblen · 21 Jan 2014

This sounds like a connectivity problem. Double check the connections, both to the hard drive and to the motherboard. Try a different SATA power connector.

It would also be a good idea to run the Western Digital Drive diagnostic program on this drive.
http://support.wd.com/product/downlo...&sid=3&lang=en

trancedellic · 21 Jan 2014

The hard is fine, connection is fine too.

One more update. The files I was trying to copy were from an external drive, Toshiba 500 gb usb 3, connected to usb 2 using FAT32. Don't know how it's related but problem occurred when I tried to copy big files. If I was to copy 2 gb files one at the time, no problem.
I tested this copying from my other drive, where I have the OS and no problems. Now I installed on this drive, games on steam and again no problems. Watched movies from it and no problems.