USB drive: "Media is write protected" on initialize after drive swap WD MyBook Essentials

Question

I got a WD MyBook Essentials the other day but after a week or so the drive physically broke.

I tried opening the case and replacing the drive with another SATA WD drive I had lying around. This seemed to work except Windows 7 drive manager didn't show any partitions (it does show the disk itself and the correct size) and said the disk needs to be initialized. When I tried to do so I got the message "The media is write protected."

Tried installing WD SmartWare but that doesn't even recognize the drive.

Also tried using gparted under Ubuntu but it came back with the message "I/O error reading /dev/sdb".

Solution 1

Unfortunately never found an answer to this, the interface is still sitting gathering dust and the drives have found other homes in the mean time.

Solution 2

Here is what I did. Download and run firmware updater for WD my book. WD firmware update After USB disk firmware upgraded, your disk will be ready to use.

Comments

[Admin]

I had the same problem but i ran the WD quick formatter and WD firmware updater and it allowed me to use it. So i now have the WD 1TB drive in my computer and my old seagate 500gb drive is in my mybook working fine :)

[PeterD]

Thanks for your reply, but that's the problem ;) It won't even allow me to initialize the drive, let alone partition or format.

[PeterD]

Hmm I was afraid of something like that. I'm not sure, the disk I tried replacing with is a WD500AAKS. My guess is it probably doesn't but Google didn't tell me much. Is there an easy way to find out, or a hard way for that matter? ;)

[mKorbel]

maybe I'm wrong carltonbale.com/…

[PeterD]

Thanks for the link. I checked it out, it had some good tips but unfortunately they didn't work for me. The drive remains "locked".