WD Elements 2 TB Drive Problem

Another thread (External Hard Drive (WD Elements) is visible in PW but not in explorer) prompted me to post this.

I've got the WD Elements External drive connected with a USB cable. Love it, works great. Until I burn a DVD with the OEM burner in the pc. At which point Windows disables the WD drive, with the message "Windows detected a problem & disabled the device". My only remedy has been physically disconnect, power down everything, reconnect and power up (WD Elements first) then the system. Everything works properly until the next DVD burn. I don't make many DVDs anymore.

Device Manager lists it as Mass Storage. It requires no driver, however Windows uses a Microsoft driver for it. I've checked on updating that one with no success.

I just ran the WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics and the drive passed. Anyone got any ideas here.

Hi Clayton

When this happens what kind of events are being log? I would hope the event manager may have better detail.

When you connect your external drive is this through a port on front of machine or one integrated to Motherboard at rear. Where I'm heading, USB power output.

Ken

I think Ken may be on to something here. I had an optical drive once that was doing all sorts of crazy things to a system. Turned out to be an internal cable "going" bad. Once I replaced the data cable, all was well.

This started with the first disc I burned a couple of days after initial installation of the WD External drive. Took me a few minutes to figure it out. But it is repeatable. Every time.

USB 3.0 Controller, 2 front ports are 3.0 and the rear ones 2.0. WD drive has it's own power supply and connected in the rear. Says it's good for 2.0 or 3.0.

Looking at Event Logs, I found nothing that I could identify. But bear in mind, I don't know much about what I'm looking at there anyway.

Burning the DVDs is done with files from the HDD and no involvement from the WD external. It's only used for a backup device. And written to several times a day following whatever I may work on. FWIW, write caching is not enabled on any of the ports.

When error occurs click on clock and get exact system time. You should be able to match against a couple of events in System and Application logs. The event or surrounding events should have some of the same words of the error message you reported.

Since device has it own power that pretty much rules out USB port power.

Is there any clue in Reliability History?
Maybe an IRQ conflict?

One wild thing to try: assign the CD/DVD reader/writer/burner drive letter I (i); assign that WD HD whatever drive letter you want, it uses the same usb port each time, correct? I'm probably sawing off my own tree limb in this thread for this situation, however, after I assigned a few drive letters to internal and external devices, they seemed to not disappear so much, stayed around much more.

These are from the last DVD event:


Burning the DVD


Attempting to access the WD External Drive


That discovery of the disabled drive?

Edit:
From the date I wrote on that last DVD, these are the only events I could find for that time frame.

I looked up this error and added the words Western Digital.

In most articles I read it pointed to updating driver or an issue with device.

You could run WD tools against drive but I doubt that any failure would be detected, you yourself said it runs great until you try to burn DVD. This would leave you with a driver issue or one of the issues previously mentioned like cables or conflicting IRQ.

Not sure on how you track down IRQ conflict. Other members?


Edit 1:

You might also head into device manager and look at the properties for your WD drive. There should be a "Policy" tab. You could change to "Better Performance" to see if that stabilizes.