Removing Drive Partitions On The My Book Live Duo For Use In A Windows 8 PC

Hello All,

The network circuit on one of my MBLD 4TB has died. I have two units that are now out of warranty, one unit still runs perfect and the other unit has the bad network circuit.

All of the hard drives are fine when I swapped them out and tested them by pairs in the working MBLD unit.

I already made a backup of all my data and wish to use these drives in a tower system as regular independant drives.

I’ve tried placing the drives into my tower pc on one of the regular SATA connectors and running Windows 8 disk manager. I was unable to remove the existing partitions.

I keep getting the message “Unable To Write To Disks”. I have no idea how to use Linux and was wondering If there is any easy utility that I can install in Windows 8 that will allow me to convert these drives to regular NTFS drives.

I know it is possible to use this model drive (WD20EARX) in my tower PC because I purchased the same model drive from Amazon as a backup drive for the My Book Live Duo 4TB but decided to use it in the Win8 tower PC instead.

Please let me know of any solutions, It would be a pity to not be able to make use of these drives because the ethernet port on the unit is defective.

Several people have been telling me to save the drives for the next unit but i’d rather make use of them now.

Thank You In Advance!

MikeyMike wrote:

I keep getting the message “Unable To Write To Disks”. I have no idea how to use Linux and was wondering If there is any easy utility that I can install in Windows 8 that will allow me to convert these drives to regular NTFS drives.

Windows (any version) should have no issues repartitioning a drive, regardless of existing partition type.

There’s something going on with the drive itself.

Have you run Data Lifeguard diagnostics on it?

Can you post a screenshot of the error you’re getting when trying to repartition in windows?