Western Digital My Book Unrecognized

[Sneakattack879]

I have tried to re-use a Western Digital 500GB My Book drive on my new HP laptop, that was previously used on a Windows XP machine.

The HDD shows up in the device manager as a USB mass storage device, yet it does not show up in My Computer. It occasionally shows up in disk management named as "Disk 1", when I try to initialize it (by the way I have no idea what that means :S help with that too?) an error message appears "Virtual Disk Manager: Incorrect Function".

This whole ordeal is really aggravating me and any help in solving this issue would be greatly appreciated. I have nearly 300 gigs of music and movies on this drive, and to lose it would be an enormous loss.

Also I haven't used the drive in over 6 months, not sure if that has any relevance.

Thanks in advance for any advice anyone can give.

-SneakAttack879

 

[dothackjhe]

I got my Western Digital External HD 150 Gb working on windows 7 by going to the Disk Management and have the computer read it and install its drivers.

 

[xarden]

Have you assigned it a drive letter in disk management?

P.S. 300gigs of music and movies is called 300gigs of "Data"

 

[WindowsStar]

I have tried to re-use a Western Digital 500GB My Book drive on my new HP laptop, that was previously used on a Windows XP machine.

The HDD shows up in the device manager as a USB mass storage device, yet it does not show up in My Computer. It occasionally shows up in disk management named as "Disk 1", when I try to initialize it (by the way I have no idea what that means :S help with that too?) an error message appears "Virtual Disk Manager: Incorrect Function".

This whole ordeal is really aggravating me and any help in solving this issue would be greatly appreciated. I have nearly 300 gigs of music and movies on this drive, and to lose it would be an enormous loss.

Also I haven't used the drive in over 6 months, not sure if that has any relevance.

Thanks in advance for any advice anyone can give.

-SneakAttack879

I have had a lot of these "My Books" not show up in Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. One way we have seen them work is to reboot the machine, DO NOT start any applications, then plug the "My Book" into a USB port. Then DO nothing, just leave the machine alone, come back in an hour and move the mouse, then leave the machine alone. Many times this makes the "My Book" work. I know it sounds completely ridiculous but it has worked for us many times. On Window Server 2008 R2 I had to leave the "My Book" plugged in overnight and in the morning it worked perfectly. -WS