Formatting HDD

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

Hi,

I just got WD 700G HD. I have couple of issues

1: I am not comfortable with the fact that i am having a 300MB partition which has some data (drivers etc) and WD specific software.

2: I formatted rest of my partition with GPARTED to NTFS. This partition is now visible to my windowsXP SPII, but when i plug it in Windows 7 (64 bit) it doesn’t show up. I can see that 300MB partition but the other parittion is not showing up. What should i do?

I have tried installing the update WD software, i have installed the 64 bit driviers from that 300MB partition but nothing works. Windows shows me that new hardware has been installed and ready to use, but when i go to My Computer i see nothing.

2

The drive shows in Disk Management? ( Start > right click on Computer, on the computer management window click on Disk Management )

Regarding the 300 MB partition, unfortunately, you are stuck with this, there is not, without voiding the warranty, a method to remove this partition.

3

What is that method? 

Well, there were couple of issues in my case.

  • Hide Empty drive option was enabled on Windows 7

  • The drive was being visible in disk manager but not otherwise. I formatted it once from disk manager and assigned a disk letter, since then its working fine.

But i am still not comfortable with extra 300 MB :@

4

safely remove the drive, then plug it back in.  you didn’t do anything to that partition.  it’s an emulation of the firmware.  the vcd, as it’s called, will only show up when you install smartware.  no smartware, no vcd.