I bought a WD "My Passport" external usb sata(?) drive last summer to use as storage space for my system. I don't know if leaving it permanently hooked up to the PC and always ON while the PC was running is bad for one of those things or not, but it seemed fine all these months.
But this morning when I booted up the PC it couldn't find my usb drive D, which is the My Passport drive. Then I started getting the same sort of click of death sounds out of the WD passport that I had gotten from my old WD internal hard drive. The self diagnostics wouldn't run due to a "missing partition"; but oddly enough, the software wanted to update itself. So I let it do that. For some reason the shortcut icon for WD Drive Utilities disappeared from the desktop afterwards, but the PC could see the drive. But then a quick diagnostic failed.
Then I dragged the icon under the start menu for the drive utilities onto the desktop and copied it there. I ran the quick diagnostic again, and it failed again. I looked at this and that, then tried the quick diagnostic one last time.
And it passed. 
So I'm not sure what the hell happened. The other night a process called mbam.exe (malware bytes anti malware) didn't shut itself off properly during shutdown, and the PC was on all night and the next day until I noticed that it was still running. I'm wondering if that error could have trashed the drivers on my C drive for WD My Passport.
I've got a lot of stuff backed up and stored on that drive, with nowhere else to put it. I'm going to lose just about everything if a full diagnostic doesn't repair or sequester any damaged tracks due to this weird click of death event.
Damn.
A bit later:
Well a few more tries at quick diaganostics failed, then I got a pass again. But a full diagnostic would always fail. -But what is weird is that since the clicking stopped, the drive acts as if nothing ever happened.
So to be safe(r) I burned some important files that would fit onto a cd.
And then when I found some more to move to a cd, my burner freaked out and wouldn't burn any more files. To top off that scare I had put the wrong cd into the burner and could have lost all my digital photos from 2003, if the burner had made the cd unreadable. Luckily the ordinary optical drive can see the images okay. *whew*
Damn, this is one flakey PC. Maybe the problems are really in the O/S?
Whoa, this is ugly. There are now 3 folders in documents and settings that call themselves Administrator, and one that calls itself Owner. And there are shadowed folders in them called "Nethood" and "Printhood". What? I'm livin' in the "hood" now?
