Cold Day In Montana

Every trip to NW Montana offers a fantastic opportunity to photograph wildlife, and this trip certainly did not disappoint. Shot with Canon T2i w/ 70-300mm EF L @ 300mm.

Western Digital My Book Model WD5000C032 External USB Hard Drive Unrecognized by Windows

After a few month of non-usage it appears that my Western Digital My Book has stopped working. The drive powers on, so you can see the Green Circular LED, but when I plug the unit into my Windows 8 machine: Windows finds the drive, but after its all said and done it says USB Device Not Recognized. I tried everything from rebooting with drive plugged in to power cycling and cold booting the hard drive. One time I was able to see my file folders but the files were all missing. 

As a result, I have decided to remove the SATA drive from the enclosure and plug it into my external USB to SATA dock:

http://www.frys.com/product/5816343?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

The process was very simple, but will basically require you to destroy your "not working" USB enclosure. The directions for removing the drive can be found here:

http://www.adcworks.com/2008/06/diy-how-to-rescue-data-from-your-western-digital-mybook/

Black Tiles Showing On Desktop Instead of Preview For Adobe Acrobat Files (PDF) with Windows 8

I had an issue where the icons on the desktop for PDF files were simply a black square. No small preview of the document, nor the traditional Adobe icon. 

Upon further research it appears that a clearing of the thumbnails cache is necessary to fix the problem.

To do this, launch the Disk Cleanup Wizard go to Control Panel >> Administrative Tools >> Free Up Disk Space By Deleting Unnecessary Files.

Once launched, scroll down the list to make sure that "Thumbnails" is checked:

Then hit "OK". Upon completion, you icons should be repaired.