Frustration From Western Digital MyBook Live NAS hard drive

Posted by: Flame on 18 September 2011

This is a copy of the email I sent western digital support team. My frustration - I think - is rather apparent. I managed to solve the problem at the end and I thought that sharing it on the forum might prevent somebody in the future from popping a vein in their neck over this. Here Goes.

Dear Sir/Madam;

I am running Windows 7 Ultimate 32 bit on my desktop. I have connected my new MyBook Live 1TB to my Linksys modem/router and I am able to access the drive through wifi from 2 laptops and therefore don't assume that anything is wrong with the hard drive.

On my desktop (my main PC) I can see the NAS drive alright but there are a few things that I can't do. These are:
1- Map Network Drive (I get a network error)
2- Open the drive to view the shares (the blue circle twirls for a minute and then "My Documents" is opened in another window. Therefore the drive is useless to me at present.

I can access the shares by entering "ftp://xxxxxxxxx" in my browser's address bar

I have attempted the following to fix the problem but all failed:
1- Restore factory settings on the NAS drive
2- Uninstall and reinstall with latest drivers and firmware
3- uninstall Karspersky antivirus
4- Disable windows firewall
5- Disable windows defender
6- Substitute my wifi USB adaptor for another one and on a different port
7- Adjusted my Windows network security settings for LAN manager authenticate level to "Send LM & NTLM"

I have created and attached a system log file in hope that it will be of use in solving the problem. I am sure you can understand my frustration after almost 24 hours of trying to solve the issue. Your help and guidance is greatly appreciated. Thank you

END OF EMAIL

After about 10 hours and many re-installations and reboots later the problem was fixed. I just had to add "Client for Microsoft Networks" to my network adapter's clients and protocols. The drive became immediately usable and I am now enjoying streaming all over the house. Hope this helps people over the forum and the net in general.

Regards...

Posted on: 18 September 2011 by Manu

Over that, my experience is this unit is not reliable, I mean the network enclosure, no problem with drives themselves. I have seen multiple case of major failure, including my own unit, where the only option was to reformat the drive. Unfortunately, the drive is originally formated with an obscure system, not NTFS nor FAT. So if you want to recover data, it is really a pain in the XXX. Forget full recovery: file names and directory structure for example are lost forever.

WD Hard Drives are OK, but I would not encourage people to use this network device. My own experience...

Posted on: 19 September 2011 by Iver van de Zand

Dear Martin,

Glad ou mentioned ! I had similar issues with my LaCie. Where exactly in Windows did you "add "Client for Microsoft Networks" to my network adapter's clients and protocols" ? I 'd like to check my settings.

Cheers,

Iver