I have a 500GB MyBook esssential that after a couple of years of behaving has begun to act up. I have tried using WD's diagnostic suite with mixed success, the extended test (usu. takes 6-7 hours) ends with a prompt to repair bad sectors (possibly clusters?) succesfully doing so. The quick test returns an error message after a few minutes to the effect of "Failed read test element" SMART self test did not complete. Vista seems to do ok when browsing the drive but OS X starts to show folders as executable and other really weird stuff. I am beginning to think that this might have something to do with how OS X handles the drive rather than the drive itself. Does anyone have any suggestions for causes or possible solutions.
The only things I know about the inner workings of a disk drive is that the platter spins and the read/write head is on an arm, but it still managed to get 53% on the hdd guru test somehow

Get a new drive.

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www.datarecoveryne.com

These drives have high failure rates. Get your data off or at least make a backup ASAP.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

MacOS + Vista... That's always "fun".

Drives are cheap, please don't share it between the systems. And yes it is failing. If you are lucky, it will let you copy the data without error messages. Make your next purchase something other than a MyBook please.

Backup and replace.

It's lucky that nothing was important was only on this drive, I always had the feeling that the mybook were just polished up shit and I guess this affirms that.
From now on 2 copies of everything I intend to keep, neither on a mybook.
Thanks for the help.