Hello everybody. This past Saturday, recieved my Western Digital MyBook Premium Edition 500GB external hard drive. This drive could be connected either through USB or firewire. Knowing that this was "plug & play" I decided to skip the obvious instructions, which by the way give detailed instructions on how to plug in a USB cable, and plugged it right in to my PC via the provided firewire.

Well the "plug" part went smoothly...now there's no "play." I remember seeing the usual "new hardware detected" bubble and proceded to install the drive. I don't remember exactly what error I recieved but I think it was unable to locate the drivers.

The first thing to pop into my head was to read the instructions...all two pages of them. Like stated earlier, all it said was how to plug in the drive. No installation instructions whatsoever. The only thing I noticed was it said to plug in the USB cable first to automatically install the drive and then plug in the firewire. I didn't think it would make such a big difference.

Next, I unplugged the firewire and then plugged it in with the USB cable. Nothing was detected. There isn't any sign of the drive being installed but I'm sure there is something in there that must be removed so I could start the installation all over again.

I went straight to their website and wanted to download the driver files. All they had was a firewire connection driver, which I installed and didn't do a thing.

I already tried emailing the Western Digital support team but I'm sure we all know how great it is to never get a response.

All I want to know is if I could get rid of whatever was put in my computer and start again or if there is a way to continue what was left unfinished.

MyBook & EBook type of USB external HDDs generally are a little different from the ordinary USB drives (no-frill types). The installation instruction for your model is HERE. Did you follow the procedures as outlined?

i_XpUser

Yes I did. The only thing I'm guessing I did wrong was plug the firewire before I installed the drive through USB. I didn't think it would make a difference.

Like I said earlier the hard drive was detected and attempted to install through the firewire but failed and now it won't detect anything through firewire or USB.

Go to device manager and see if there are any hardware devices with exclamation points.

What does Disk Management show?

Life is more painless for those who are brainless.

Device manager doesn't show any hardware with exclamation points. I checked USB controllers and disk drives thuroughly and then checked every other catagory just in case but there's not even any western digital devices besides the internal hard drive my computer originally came with.

As for disk management, it only displays the (C:) drive and another drive with a blank drive letter. The unknown drive says it's only 6.5 GB so it can't be the new 500 GB drive.

I wonder what that unknown drive might be...oh well I'll solve that at another time.

well, you could try it in somebody else's computer following the procedures and see if it works or you could re-install windows on your computer and start from scratch, cheers

gf

Well here's the final update:

I went to my girlfriend's house today and tried it on her laptop...and nothing.

Tried it on her parent's PC...nothing.

Last but not least I tried it on her brother's Mac...nothing...

So much for a new hard drive. Looks like I'll be going through a couple weeks of trying to get a replacement.

Thanks everybody for all your help and support!