After trying to restore a backup from the 1TB MyBook Essentials to the laptop using WD Acronis, something weird happened... it formatted the laptop hard drive! Had to reinstall Windows 7 from the Dell DVDs. Now it won't recognize the MyBook so we can retrieve our data! I tried it on 4 different computers and none of them recognize a drive letter and it doesn't show up in Disk Management either. Since it is no longer under warranty, I searched the Internet for solutions. One was to take the hard drive out of the WD case, use a connector kit to plug it in and retrieve the data. Unfortunately none of the computers find it that way either. Does this have something to do with the small circuit boards connected to the hand drive? One was removed when disassembling the case. On one forum I read that there is a chip on the controller board that could have failed. Isn't there any way to use the hard drive like an internal hard drive that goes into desktop computer? Any ideas? We'd also like to get our data off of it.