Using a new WD HD in my old WD 'My Book' USB interface - how?

[Tommygunn]

I have a 1Tb Western Digital My book which holds WD10EAVS disk. Problem is, is that I have bought another 1Tb Green WD10EZRX disk to act as an additional backup, assuming that I could just plug in the existing 'My book' USB interface and use it.

I apply power and the lights come on but I cannot get into it. I can go into basic details in 'drivers and devices' and it tells me it is detecting it fine but I can't format it and certainly can't save any data to it.

What can I do to resolve this?

Tom.

 

[[Ion]]

The problem (I would imagine) is that the disk isn't formatted. In the Start Menu, search for "disk management" and chose the option that comes up. Right click on the unpartitioned new disk, and format it as NTFS

 

[95Viper]

You don't say which model you have... some of the my books use WD's on board controller, which has encryption built in (chip on the controller) and use 4KB LBAs instead of the traditional 512-byte sector sizes.
As far as I know Vista does not support it natively.
Info, in attachment below, is from MS KB web page "Article ID: 982018 - Last Review: March 12, 2012 - Revision: 16.0"


You may need to format it with WD's software.

External USB/FireWire Fat32 Formatting Utility

Or, you may be able to clone the drive (since they are the same size) with WD acronis software.

 

[Tommygunn]

All sorted!
Thanks for the pointers Ion, that really helped. The main problem I then hit was that I'm on someone else's computer so had to be signed into their admin account.
Anyway, went into the Windows 8 'computer management' section and I'm currently formatting.

Cheers,
Tom.