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A beeping HD drive ususally means the read element can't move, usually caused by a head crash, so the drive is most likley dead, and there really isn't anything you can do to recover the data. EDIT: I totally missed the external part of your post so disregard my post.

We go through a lot of hard drives where I work and recently we have run into a major issue with one Western Digital 1TB Black series hard drive. Specifically the WD1001FALS The issue was this, if we did a cold boot on our system with the WD1001FALS installed, the drive would not show up in the BIOS. Now if we left the system on and simply reset the system, the drive would appear in the BIOS and work perfectly. Now the fix for this issue was to disable quick boot in the BIOS and that seemed to give the drive enough time to initialize and the BIOS would see the drive every time. Basically you just need to slow down your boot sequence so the drive can initialize before the BIOS tries to read from them, enabling AHCI mode or RAID mode seemed to fix this issue as well. This issue only seems to be showing up on newer versions of the WD1001FALS. After working with Western Digital on this issue here was their response. So it seems the addition of this feature is what is causing this issue, as usual they deny that this is a problem. So my question to the rest of the forum is have any of you seen this problem on this drive or any other recent Western Digital drives?

Sound like something went weird with your partition tables, to fix it I would goto http://www.dban.org/ and use DBAN to wipe the drive or you can also use the DOS version of Seatools from Seagate http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools/ to erase your drive. Also note that Win2000 has problems with drives over 127gb during install, so you may need to manually make a partition that is less then 127gb during the text mode of the install.

There is no other way that I know of to remove Bluebirds from the drives other then this fix. I don't have any systems here with Vista 64 that I could test with, but I would think the tool would run under Vista 64, you may need to run it as Administrator for it to work. That is why I went through so much trouble to get this fix from LG, you had 3 of them, I have over 50 most of which were going to military customers who don't like extra bits of software hanging around in their systems

HoppaLong it sounds to me like you have eSATA drives that may be under powered or are not fully compatible with SATAII. If they are under powered that would explain why when you goto copy a large file to the drive it dissapears. Also that error message you are getting is because the drives are disconnecting during a write operation, you would get the same error if you un-plugged the drives while copying files to them. Do you know if the desktops at your business have SATAII ports? Also are the eSATA drives preassembled or did you buy an enclosure then add a hard drive? Did you try using a different set of cables? If your cables can't handle SATAII and they were connected to SATAI ports at your business, that would explain why they work there and not on your home desktop. Finally if you did buy and enclosure and added a drive to it, then check the "limit to 1.5gb" jumper and try enabling or disabling this feature.

I hard to believe that any tech would pay $140 for something like this, I test systems all the time and I just use an old mounting plate for the motherboard then just set the rest of the components next to it. Makes it far easier to swap out parts quickly.

Sounds like you may have just had a bad connection or cable. Have you tried putting the drive back into the original system?

This will NOT remove the Bluebirds program from your system if you have already installed it, it only removes the app from the firmware of the drive. And yes it is weird that the program doesn't show anything while it's working, but it was made for OEMs not consumers.

LG GH22NS50 Bluebirds Removal Tool For those of you who may have bought this drive not knowing that there was some annoying software called "Bluebirds" embedded it the DVD-ROM drive that shows up when there is no disc and the drive is closed. There is a tool to disable it attached to this post, it is an official tool from LG that isn't on their site ( I had to talk to a sales manager to get it ). When you run it it will not display any confirmation dialog when it is finished. The tool only take a few seconds to run, then just open and close your drive and Bluebirds should be gone. As for LG Electronics USA it seems they had no idea that this software was even included in these drives untill they made it into distribution. Personally I think whoever green lighted this annoying piece of adware to be embedded into these drives should be promptly fired. EDIT: I have removed to the tool from this post because LG has posted an offical firmware update that removes the Bluebirds feature. The firmware update can be found here, under the "Drivers & Software" tab. http://www.lge.com/us/support/product/supp...elCode=GH22NS50 New firmware (TN01) for only GH22NS50(Removed BlueBird Function) Model:GH22NS50 Ver:TN01 -Removed BlueBird Function EDIT: Noticed a minor glitch with the firmware upgrade from LG, if you have the drive closed the firmware updater sees Bluebirds as a CD and won't run till you remove the disc. To get around this simply eject the drive tray and leave it open while the update runs. EDIT: A few people have requested the original tool and have had problems with the firmware update so I have attached the original Bluebirds Removal Tool to the post again. Bluebird_SETTER_Silent.zip