I plug in the lay flat in both my mac and windows laptops and in the mac it does not show the drive but it does show in the Disk Utility and a storage device. In the case of the Windows Laptop it does not show in explorer but it does show in device manager. What can I do to remedy this problem?
We worked with Marcel via email on this issue. Posting the results for the benefit of anyone who may encounter this post while researching a similar issue.
The drive was recognized in Disk Management, but Windows saw no filesystem, and therefor could not mount the drive or access any data.
The drive had been removed from a WD MyBook enclosure, though uncertain which model as the previous enclosure was no longer available. Many of the MyBook models will either encrypt the data, or perform some sort of sector emulation/proprietary formatting to allow for compatibility with legacy OSes such as XP. (Note: it’s not just WD that does this. Unfortunately such non-standard formatting is very common throughout the external drive enclosure world.)
In these cases, it means the contents of the drive will not be readable outside of it’s original enclosure. (The drive could of course be reformatted in a standard way with the Plugable dock, but that’s of course a separate issue from accessing the data.)