Device is a WB MyBook Essential, 1TB with USB 3.0. Lately it has had issues with detection and I've had to go into Windows 7's Disk Management and assign a drive letter, or do so in Paragon Partition Manager, when connecting the drive. Once or twice, Partition Manager would fail to recognize the drive's partition properly but the problem would stop after reconnecting the drive.
I have lots of uncompressed video on that drive which I just edited and finished today. I rendered the video once yesterday and once today, and then rebooted when I was done. The drive was no longer being recognized at all; Windows 7 kept asking to format it, and Partition Manager took a long time to detect the device, only to be unable to recognize the partition on the disk. Leaving the disk connected, I get notifications from Windows to format it every few minutes. (Accompanied by the "this device can perform faster" note if I connect to USB 2.0 instead of 3.) I did try formatting it from Windows, but it was unable to do so and I don't want to go farther and actually format it since the video is still on there and I need to continue editing it.
Not sure where the problem was caused. Possiblities:
- Heat (seems unlikely)
- I/O screwup on editing program or Windows causing corruption
- Wearout or damage
Problems could be:
- Enclosure's controller
- The HDD itself
- Both
Options:
- Gut the drive out and put it in the computer. It's very well possible that the enclosure controller messed up but the disk is okay. If I can do this, then perfect, since I can resume editing the video without having to relocate the video clips to the compressed copies I have.
- RMA it with WD. Still has a year of warranty.
I'm still looking through the options and thinking about it, but loosing the uncompressed source footage and having to redirect the sources is less than idea, particularly if there's some way I can just get the disk working again. Unfortunately, I can't use CHKDSK since the volume/partition is not being recognized properly.
I get similar problems when using other computers and operating systems.
Thoughts? Thanks in advance.