Hello to all, first time posting here. I just bought the Western Digital "My Book" drive, the essential one with 250 gb of memory. I have an Intel pentium 800, with 20gb of memory. It started on the wrong foot, with my computer having trouble realizing that it was a usb device that was new. It did recognize it but then, everything froze and I could do nothing. Everytime I connect the drive it freezes everything but as soon as I disconect it I can see the D drive with the My Book software only then it dissapears!. My operating system is Windows Me. I did check the usb peripherals and all the slots are perfect. Any answer would be appreciated.

Hi there Fuzzy,
Firstly, welcome to CompuForums. I hope that you can visit our forum often in the future and post - rather than just receiving our help and advice, and then never visiting again. We provide our help for free, and all we ask in return is that you participate in our forum and refer your friends, or consider a premium membership. Not giving back to the community is like stealing - we provide our time for free and hope to have some of yours spent on the site in return.

This problem is very likely to be due to the fact that you are running a seven-year-old OS, Windows Me - widely regarded as Microsoft's worse version of Windows, and they stopped releasing updates for it long ago. I seriously suggest that you either upgrade to XP or get to know and use a Linux distro for home users such as Ubuntu [which is free], and if you must continue to use Windows Me, use some good security software [Avast Antivirus, Spybot Search and Destroy, Comodo Personal Firewall].
Did the external hard drive come with a CD-Rom at all, and did you install the driver on it before inserting the drive?

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Well, no, the drive did not come with a disc and as far as drivers, the company says that only win98 needs them, not Me. Yes my computer is old, but I bought a device to tranfer my pictures , a card reader and it works very well. It was recognized instantly. It cannot be that my computer is too old, if so then the company should not list Me as good enough for the drive!

Try downloading the 98 driver. Windows Me is actually based very closley on Windows 98. Often if something works on 98 [with the driver] they'll say it works with Me. And it's not so much the computer being too old [but if it's 5yrs+ consider upgrading it], but the OS. Windows Me is very temperamental.

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First, as far as downloading drivers for Me, I will not go that route and risk totally screwing up my system. I have never downloaded drivers in the past and everything has always worked well. I am pretty sure that the drive is at fault; today I installed another card reader and it was recognized by the system and worked very well. I tried again with the drive and it simply stalled, everything froze. Strangely enought when i checked my card reader and I wanted to eject the component I saw drives d,e,f,and g! The card reader was d. I suspect that the system installed the drive but then something prevents it from going on. All reviews that I have seen on this drive said that installation was very easy, but then most of them had xp! I will return the unit, have no choice as I am getting frustrated with this. I emailed WD about this and of course, no responses of them...

I doubt this is a unit fault. Installing a driver won't hurt your system - it will just fix the problem. By the way, it's normal to see several drives for card readers - each one represents one slot. Sometimes you have to play a guessing game to figure out which one is the one with the card in, unless they're labelled!
However, if even after trying the drive with the driver installed, then try returning it. But this is very likely to be down to there not being a driver for the drive. If you can, try phoning WD - I've found most tech companies rarely read their e-mails, or take several months to reply to them.

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Most External HDDs don't come with a drivers disc.

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Hi Fuzzy.
I have very similar problem right now, and im trying to figure it out too. I dont think the problem is your OS, since my OS is XP . but its a little bit different - i bought the 160GB drive, and it is indeed recognized, but when im transferring data from the Internal HD to the external (or the other way) , at some point the computer freezes, and even disconnecting the drive doesnt help, so i must shut it down with the button.
I looked at the Event Viewer after the reboot but didnt find anything usefull, did you look up there?

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This user has not logged in for months, so I shall lock the thread.

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