I started formatting a WD My Book external drive last Sunday at about 3pm. By Saturday morning it had reached 45%. Enough.  I cancelled the formatting, shut my computer down and moved the drive to my laptop.

On the laptop, I started formatting at about noon, and was finished by 10pm. Slow, but soooo much better than waiting for my desktop to do it.

A Mac is starting to look pretty good right about now.

Anyway, now I have an operational 1TB drive and I’m looking for a way to (economically) retrieve the data from my old 500GB drive. It still powers up, but it doesn’t communicate – not with the desktop or the laptop.

I see in the WD FAQ section, that you can use the drives as internal drives, but doing so will void your warranty. Well, any warranty on that old 500GB drive was up long ago, so I need to figure out how to open it up and try the drive directly on my computer.

Any ideas out there?