[ASK] WD My Book Essential Hard Disk Swap

[blacklizt]

I have an WD My Book Essential 1Tb. and i opened the case and take the WD 1Tb Green from it and use it for internal drive

( the data on it can't be read on computer running Win XP .. it says RAW.. i have to re partitioned the hard drive, before i re-partitioned the hard drive i try to read the hard drive on the usb via my WD My Book Essential and all the data is there.. so i think the WD My Book Essential have a different partition tipe or so.. )

the problem is when i try to replace the original Hard drive that how to make my old 640Gb or 750Gb WD Green can be read from my WD My Book Essential case ?

it look likes the drive doesn't work on it.. even i try to put the 1Tb back into the case.. its wont work

So anyone please do u have any idea what to do, its sure the WD My Book Essential is out of warranty

 

[luftschlucker]

i have the same problem here.
I wonder what they did to the controller to prevent it working with other HDDs.

 

[blacklizt]

hahahah.. doing some desperate thing.. i forced to istall 80 Giga Seagate SATA harddrive into WD My Book Essential 1Tb..

and the trick is to format it using the software that came with WD My Book Essential 1Tb... and it works ^^

now i usiing Seagate My Book Essential 80Gb LOL

 

[harogomez]

How did you do that?

 

[harogomez]

hahahah.. doing some desperate thing.. i forced to istall 80 Giga Seagate SATA harddrive into WD My Book Essential 1Tb..

and the trick is to format it using the software that came with WD My Book Essential 1Tb... and it works ^^

now i usiing Seagate My Book Essential 80Gb LOL

How did you do that?

 

[fzabkar]

Essentials models incorporate 128-bit (256-bit ?) AES hardware encryption, irresective of whether you have set a password. The Initio/symwave IC on the bridge board does the encryption. If you install the HDD inside your PC, all you will see is gibberish, ie a RAW disk.

I have seen at least one WD user say that he had to use SmartWare to partition and format a replacement drive in his WD enclosure. Other tools didn't work, presumably because they were confused by the fact that WD's recent externals use 4KB LBAs rather than the traditional 512-byte sector sizes.

 

[dell44223]

If I copied all of my data (from my My Book Essential 1Tb) to another drive and proceeded to take the hdd out of the case, how would I go about putting it into another case and making it usable?

 

[fzabkar]

If you are not concerned with the existing data, then all you would need to do would be to repartition and reformat the drive in its new enclosure (SATA 3.5") using Disk Management or your preferred tool.

 

[eBoyDog]

If you took the original drive out and want to replace it with a different drive, you have to install the WES driver and then download and run the Windows quick formatter program from Western Digital.

There might be another way such as a few of the linux boot cd partition tools like gparted, but this is the easiest way.

I found the My book 2tb drives on close out at Staples for $41, bought 4 of them just to steal the drives for other purposes and I'm now using the Western Digital cases for extra storage with s few old 500 and 300 Gb drives I had laying around.