Others have said it and now it is my turn. I bought a 2TB MyBook Essential external drive for archiving data and while I am happy to leave it in NTFS format, I find it extremely disappointing to read of people’s frustrations with WD’s lack of support for linux.
No one is asking for WD to suddenly announce official support. But I think it is not unreasonable for WD to unofficially provide support in the way of some information about using ext3 and ext4 and partitioning using gparted. From experience I know that a number of WD technical staff would be running linux in their homes. It is almost certain that some of them will be using WD products. Let them post some decent feedback on using linux even if you have to post a disclaimer about voiding the warranty and so on.
Do the right thing for once instead of living up to the usual nasty cold, corporate image of big companies. Linux is popular enough to justify it. We don’t want smartware software because most linux users just want the freedom to use the drives the way we want.
Last time I tested it (which was admittedly a while ago), ext3 did work with the WDTV Live. We do not officially support it, but you may wish to try it first. Let me know if it doesn’t work.
Why is it so hard for Western Digital to take one of their test drives, repartition it gparted, create some partitions formatted as ext3, then run some tests? Then post a link on the support site saying something like “UNOFFICIAL: Linux FAQ”. I mean, linux is growing quickly in popularity thanks to some very user-friendly distros like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and so on. Those of us who work in IT choose WD products because we like them and trust them. And many of us have simply had enough with Windows – the amount of effort it takes to keep it secure has become a tedious chore. @Guy - I don’t know what WDTV Live is sorry. I have a WD MyBook Essential 2TB external hard drive. My understanding, based upon the reading of comments here in this forum and on Ubuntu forums, is that the enclosure housing the 2TB WD drive has firmware that does hides crucial information from utilities such as gparted. Is the only true solution to void the warranty by open the WD enclosure to remove the hard drive and using it in a generic enclosure?
There really isn’t any place in here for you to post something like this. However, you could post it as an idea in our Ideas Lab. Nevertheless, it’s doubtful that we’ll be rewriting our software to work on Linux anytime soon. But who knows, Linux is gaining more and more popularity.
