WD my book essential not working on windows

try the take ownership app

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/add-take-ownership-to-explorer-right-click-menu-in-vista/

You can download drive at this site:

http://members.driverguide.com/driver/detail.php?driverid=325970

Good luck!

Western Digital 1TB External Hard Drive My Book Essential
you should read their manual

It's not True.. Windows Vista will detect fat32 system and read the content without any problem.

First you try to connect the WD into different USB port and check. Also check whether your USB drivers have been installed on your system.
2nd Option: Connect the WD and restart the system.
3rd Option: Check whehter the WD has been detected and check whehter the drive letter has been assigned by the system automatically. for this go to disk management and check the same.

Revert back for more assistance and give your valuable feedback/rating for the soluton provided.

Thank you for using Fixya.

First things first, make sure that you have a really good antivirus. They should have given you a free trial one but that only last a certain amount of days. Be sure and register it (set it up).

Secondly, always a good idea to run Windows updates. The computer does it for you automatically but on it's own time. Need to make sure and run it, get everything up to date. You can do that by going to control panel, under security, click, check for updates.

That's pretty much it, I would also suggest going thru and removing programs that are useless, such as AOL, free trial games, etc. but that's just me.

Have fun!

make sure the USB cable i OK if not u have to open up mechanicely an conected with sata cable....

retur it. sounds like hard drive problem.

I don't know your exact model, so please take a look at the WD support page. You will find all available drivers for the My Book drive series.

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?level1=1&lang=en

It should not really need drivers in Win2K or Vista, you might have a problem with your USB drivers. Go into device manager, remove any devices under the USB heading and reboot. All the drivers should reinstall and hopefully your MyBook will come alive again. Otherwise, try the MyBook on a friend's computer, if it doesn't work there then the MyBook may be faulty itself.

Go back to XP