Won't Initialize External Hard Drive
 

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
Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com

Won't Initialize External Hard Drive
 

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!!!!!!

Won't Initialize External Hard Drive
 

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!!!!!!

Won't Initialize External Hard Drive
 

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
Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com

Won't Initialize External Hard Drive
 

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
Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com

Won't Initialize External Hard Drive
 

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

Won't Initialize External Hard Drive
 

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