WD MyBook World Edition 500GB Model: WD5000G032

Mine was a defective hard disk controller. I've gone through WD and will be getting it replaced under warranty. Unfortunately I have had to get the data restored through expensive professional services ... :-(

Well, from what I've read, it was an overheating problem with the power supply. I did an RMA, and my new drive power supply cord looks different. So far no problems (crosses fingers).Regardless, customers shouldn't have to go through the stress of wondering if all their files are lost forever.

I can smell a defective hard disk controler in my sleep , this wreaks of it.

you're all not alone , as you can see many others have the problem , that sure smells like a bad batch of hard drive controlers to me , if that is indeed the case

USE YOUR WARRENTY :-)

Again this smells like a bad batch of hard drive controlers to me , sometimes that happens in production runs , and well , it's warrenty time.

shalom

I reckon I'm gonna have to go down the warranty route as well. I got the hard drive out of the case and eventually got it working in a pc. Had trouble with unsigned windows SCSI drivers and also had to install a special driver-like tool so that windows can read ext2 and ext3, the linux filesystems.

http://www.fs-driver.org/download.html

All my files were there and ok, so it definitely aint the drive that's broke. I've been looking at

http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/backup-images-of-mybook

as well as other pages on this site, with the aim of using these images to restore the OS in case that has somehow gotten corrupt. I havent tried very hard but I cant seem to get Ubuntu to recognise the drive. I'm thinking I might need to install some SCSI drivers, as that was the problem in windows. Havent done that before so I'll have to look into that. I might not bother however, as like is said above, the issue does seem to stink of some hardware failure on behalf of the casing.

I had the same problem as everyone else here - blue rings go out and then - nothing.  I called WD's data recovery partners and got quotes from $700-$1500 to recover the data because it is a network device!  Thanks Kellydam for the first clue.  I took my MyBook apart (start with rubber seal around the edges, then "unhook" it top and bottom on front of device by inserting a flat tip screwdriver through middle slot).  I purchased a Gigaware SATA enclosure and pluged it in to my computer.  Nothing.  I didn't get access to my files until I used Explore2fs to view the ext3 file system.