WD My Book Essentials 2TB standby or fast flashing

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for Windows
1

I have a 2TB WD MB Essentials and yesterday it started playing up massively.

It all of a sudden popped up in windows ‘usb device not recognised…’

I rebooted and it wasn’t in my computer or disk management.  It was in device manager and devices and printers.

I tried it on my laptop.  Same thing.

I tried it on my friends laptop and it worked fine.

So I reinstalled windows 8.1 64-bit.  A right ball ache.

Magically it reappeared!!

But then windows update wanted to do a restart without warning me, I clicked cancel and I got the ‘usb device not recognised again’.  Since then I just cannot get it to work.  I have uninstalled all USB hubs apart from the one my mouse and keyboard are in.  I have uninstalled the SES driver on numerous occasions.  I have tried different USB ports.  Nothing is working.  I managed to get the light from a fast blink to a slow blink by disabling the USB 3 controller.  But now I cannot get it to ‘wake up’.  I really do not want to have to reinstall Windows again to get it to work.  I think I need to delete all traces of this hard drive on the computer, but I don’t know where to start in terms of registry.  I know the drive works because it is fine on my friends laptop, just I have no means of copying 1.1TB of data from the drive on his laptop.

Can anyone help?

2

Hello,

Do you have the drive plugged in directly into a wall outlet? The issue you area having could be related to a power issue.

3

Thanks for the reply. It is plugged into the mains.

I found a solution although it isn’t ideal. I read elsewhere that this is a common problem with these units and the only way around it is to unplug the jab and power, then plug both back in at the same time. Solved the issue for a while then had to do it again. I think the drive is failing because it just won’t reliably copy/paste from the last set of folders I have been using. I thought I’d found a suspect file causing the issue so I deleted it, only for another file to start causing an issue. Both files are dng’s from my camera and luckily not selected photos I’m going to use for the wedding clients final package. Ordered a new internal drive to copy all the wd drive files to then I will just run diagnostics on the bare drive out of the enclosure to see if I can resolve the issue.