Hey guys, glad I found this forum.

I bought a WD my book essentials a while ago so I decided to open it up and use the hard drive as internal storage. I connected it up to the motherboard, turned the computer on and once in windows, will not spool up or anything. It does pick it up in device manager though and disk management tells me that it needs to be initialised.

I hooked it back up to the my book essentials caddy and it works perfectly fine and my data is still on it (backed it all up in case I kill the drive)

So is there a way I can flash it with a stock firmware to turn it into a standard internal drive?

It IS a standard drive, but the data on it is encrypted by the USB connector PCB.

Just install it, initialize it, repartition it (losing any previous data, of course) and it'll work just like any other drive.

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But it didnt even power up? not even a hum. Oh well, I just put it back in the enclosure and will continue to use it as an external drive for now.

Thanks

Well, if it didn't power up, then you've got some other problem.

We remove WD drives from their enclosures everyday, without any such problems.

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In your first post you say that "it does pick it up in device manager though and disk management tells me that it needs to be initialised".

Is it possible that your drive is configured to Power Up In Standby (PUIS)? Is there a PM2 jumper installed?

Jumper Settings for WD SATA and EIDE Hard Drives:
http://www.wdc.com/en/library/eide/2579-001037.pdf

If the PUIS is set in the firmware, then you could use HDAT2 or Hitachi's Feature Tool to reconfigure it.

http://www.hdat2.com
http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/d ... de_215.pdf

Hard disk doesn't spin up - PUIS (Power Up In Standby):
http://www.hdat2.com/hdat2_faq.html#q19

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

If PM2 jumper is installed, please let us know. I've never seen it on a factory-configured WD product -- that would be a new data point for me.

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