The quick fix for this is to turn off and unplug the MyBook, and then give it a few sharp taps around the power button to dislodge it. While hard drives can fail at times for odd reasons, in this instance it turned out to be a problem with the drive's enclosure.Īpparently the power button on the MyBook enclosure can get stuck, and since holding the power button on many devices is a way to reset them or otherwise send custom commands to the firmware, this could cause the MyBook to power up but then stop communicating properly with the computer. This problem started happening after the system had been using the drive successfully for a while, and had performed numerous Time Machine backups to it.
The drive would appear to start mounting or otherwise be recognized by the system, but then seem to hang and not be recognized. Recently we received an e-mail from a MacFixIt reader who wrote in with a fix he found for his Western Digital MyBook external hard drive that had stopped working.
In reality we do not recommend you 'smack' your hard drive or other system components, but sometimes a little love tap or two can fix odd problems.
