This is just a note to any Linux user who is thinking about getting a WD My Passport because they found the one thread about increasing the speed of the drive and they understand fdisk and gparted and they think they can eliminate the Virutal CD.
You cannot.
WD’s firmware update programs do not work under wine. The virtual CD does not appear as any kind of partition under fdisk. There is no binary blob UDF or ISO file. Even if you repartition, reformat, and cat /dev/zero over the entire device you are stuck with a USB drive and a CD appearing on your desktop everytime you plug in the drive.
Pick a different vendor, don’t waste your time.
Small rant: WD software engineers seem like glorified hackers at best. I’m going back to my policy of never buying from a company that has “aspx” files in their URLs.
I think the problem is most people don’t understand they are screwed by Smartware until after the purchase, and then since there is no fix to completely remove it, they are pissed to the point that it doesn’t matter if you have another product that doesn’t have Smartware on it.
The drive is not clearly labeled as having non-removable software on it, there is no way to know this from the packaging. So you can’t blame the consumer for thinking that it’s going to be like any one of the dozens of USB hard drives that they already have experience with.
So when you tell people “We do sell an Elements Portable drive that has nothing on it.” It’s too late. It’s much easier to remember not to buy a WD USB drive in the future because I got burned last time.
You guys need to look up customer service.
“customers have memories. They will remember you, whether you remember them or not.” Further, “customer trust can be destroyed at once by a major service problem, or it can be undermined one day at a time, with a thousand small demonstrations of incompetence.”
So when you tell people “We do sell an Elements Portable drive that has nothing on it.” It’s too late. It’s much easier to remember not to buy a WD USB drive in the future because I got burned last time.
It’s never too late to try and point people in the right direction. I wasn’t being a smart aleck for posting that. I posted it for two reasons: 1) for those who can return the drive and get on that would be more to their liking; and 2) I posted it for those that are looking at these boards for help on what they should buy. I’m sorry if that offends you.
