Won't Initialize External Hard Drive

[Fishdoc]

I am having problems getting Vista to recognize my Western Digital My Book hard drives (both a 500 GB and a 1 TB drive). When I plug the USB cable in it goes through the installing drivers and says it installed and the device is ready to use. However My Computer doesn't show the drive. Disk Manager tells me the drive needs to be initialized but when I try to initialize the drive I get one of two error messages the first says "Incorrect Function". I then tried using System Restore to reset the computer to before the last Windows Update since the drives worked fine in the past and it seems unlikely 2 drives would fail at exactly the same time. Again when I plugged the drive in it said installed the drivers and the device was ready to use, but no drive in My Computer and Disk Manager again said the drive needs to initialized. This time when I tried to initialize the drive I got the error message "The drive cannot find the sector requested"

Ideas?

Fishdoc wrote:
> I am having problems getting Vista to recognize my Western Digital My
> Book hard drives (both a 500 GB and a 1 TB drive). When I plug the USB
> cable in it goes through the installing drivers and says it installed
> and the device is ready to use. However My Computer doesn't show the
> drive. Disk Manager tells me the drive needs to be initialized but when
> I try to initialize the drive I get one of two error messages the first
> says "Incorrect Function". I then tried using System Restore to reset
> the computer to before the last Windows Update since the drives worked
> fine in the past and it seems unlikely 2 drives would fail at exactly
> the same time. Again when I plugged the drive in it said installed the
> drivers and the device was ready to use, but no drive in My Computer and
> Disk Manager again said the drive needs to initialized. This time when
> I tried to initialize the drive I got the error message "The drive
> cannot find the sector requested"
>
> Ideas?
>
>


You do NOT want to initialize the drive if it has data on it...
that will blank it out!!!!!!

[Fishdoc]

philo

The only data on the drives is backups of my computers both of which fortunately are currently functioning correctly. If I could initialize the drives, I could re-run the backups. Western Digital Support tells me the "Drive Interface" has failed, seems strange that the same thing would happen to two different drives at the same time.

Any ideas?

Fishdoc wrote:
> philo
>
> The only data on the drives is backups of my computers both of which
> fortunately are currently functioning correctly. If I could initialize
> the drives, I could re-run the backups. Western Digital Support tells
> me the "Drive Interface" has failed, seems strange that the same thing
> would happen to two different drives at the same time.
>
> Any ideas?
>
>



What that means is that the electronics in the USB enclosure seemingly
has failed.

Since it's happened with two different devices my *guess* is that there
is a *driver* problem as I find it unlikely that two drives would fail
at the same time

My guess is the hard drives themselves are fine
and if you installed them internally...
rather than using the USB enclosure...they'd probably work


I've visit the WD's website and see if they have any updated Vista
drivers for those enclosures