Why do I have to physically disconnect/connect My Book from the mains to start the drive? I’m running Windows 7 and an older My Book Essential–I’ve had this problem for some time, but now getting very tired of groping around behind the PC for the plug.
The drive works fine once it is up and running, but if I shut down my PC, I have to pull the plug and re-connect. It’s not even good enough to disconnect the power lead from the drive and reconnect. I have set up “safely remove hardware” icon in the task bar and select that prior to disconnecting the drive, but when I start up again, I must still disconnect/reconnect to run the drive. This is a bit of a pain–surely there’s a better way to do it???
I am experiencing the same thing. Running on a Win 7 HP 64, HP Laptop, with a WD My Book Essentials 2TB drive. It is very annoying and inconvenient. I’ve had the drive and laptop for about a month. I don’t remember if it booted with it plugged in at first, but it definitely hasn’t for the last 2 weeks. I wonder if it was SP1? I just loaded that on May 23rd.
Please follow the directions below to disconnect your external hard drive from a PC using USB 3.0 , USB 2.0 or FireWire.
Please ensure that any files residing on the external hard drive are closed and no programs are accessing the hard drive.
Right-click on the WD SmartWare Iconon the taskbar to view a list of available USB or FireWire hard drives to eject.
Locate and highlight the external hard drive in the list of available devices.
Click on the Stop button to safely remove the drive from the Operating System.
The hard drive will spin down and turn off on it’s own. When prompted, You can unplug the USB or FireWire cable and/or power cable.
This is the easest way I have found to disconnect the drive,or you can keep your finger on the start button on the back of unit for up to 60 seconds, when you want to switch it back on just press the start switch.
As we all know pulling cables out all the time soon leads to a broken socket.hope this helps I pulled my hair out for a couple of days over this restart problem even had a look at bios but no way was I giving up my wireless keyboard.
If it’s interfering with bootup go into BIOS and make sure the USB comes after HD in Boot order. USB is frequently set first on newer PCs instead of CD or DVD.
on the taskbar to view a list of available USB or FireWire hard drives to eject.
