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WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

I have a new 500 Gig passport.  Along with 20 other Ext. HDD’s of different types.  The problem with any of these drives, are the fact that they show up as “local Hard Drives”.  And that’s great for most people, but I need an Ext. HDD at least 500 gigs in size, but I need it to show up as a “USB HDD”.  In other words I want it to look the same as it would if I plugged in a thumb drive, memory stick, flash drive, whatever you want to call it.  I know that these (most) drives are actual moving HDD’s and not SSD’s and that’s why they show up local.  Is there anyway around this problem, I’ve never fought this battle before so maybe there is a tweak or fix for it? Thanks in advance for any help.

2

Connect the device to a NAS unit as extra storage. Usually pops up as an available mappable share that will have that extension. You dont have to actually map to it, as you can also accesss it through Network Places. Dont know if this helps with your desired result, but it is a possible workaround.

3

Yes your right but i dont use the drive in Windows, i use (or want to use it) to load images on new pcs (using Ghost32). I tried to partition a fat32 chunk of the drive for a boot sequence and NTFS the rest of the drive to store the images. This drive will not boot on startup for anything, i even broke down and prayed about it. But seriously i have tried everything, thought maybe it was something small or stupid, thats usually the things i miss. Of course i could use ghost accross the network but i have alot of remote sites and pulling an image from here to there, well its slow, like downloading a BluRay movie.

4

Also the bios does support “boot from usb”, if its a thumb drive. More avanced bios will see the drive but not the bios of the 300 computers i need it for.

5

If you want to be prompt to safely remove hardware, you could change the policies by going to windows explorer, right click on your drive , select properties, then Hardware tab, highlight your WD My Passport , click on properties down right , click on policies , then optimize for performance.