Sent you a private msg with a link to the pics. Sorry about the quality, could have been better.
Mjbo66,
I also need to clone an old 1TB drive to my 1TB mybook using acronis…what to do? Have you found a solution to reclaiming the VCD space?
Just got 3 My Passports today. What a piece of junk! They are going back tomorrow
I have many of the original Passports without all this extra software and they are great.
WD you just lost a customer
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Count me in, too. My new ones are nothing like the older ones I have. This is over priced trash. I called support just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. The guy kept saying “we can disable it.” I said “can I utilize that space?” He said “we can disable it.” I guess he was hoping I was an ■■■■■ and repeating the same thing over and over would help. I just said thanks, I’m returning these.
Wake up WD.
Wake up.
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I have a recent 1Tb Passport Essential.
Will the method in this thread read across to the Passports?
Also my Mac won’t boot from the Passport (GUID and everything correct). Any thoughts about whether it would boot after a DBAN process?
Thanks
EDIT meant to add that WD actually says they don’t support booting Macs from externals (although they admit some do). Is the VCD the reason perhaps?
Update,
Just tried the booting thing again, and this time it’s working, both a fresh install and a clone.
Suspect the issue was that previously the partitions on the passport were “ignoring ownership on this volume” which is the default after formatting an external with Disk Utility, but can mess up bootability.
Probably won’t do anything to my passport now until a problem surfaces.
I’m going to return my WD external drive and buy a different brand. That should solve the annoying “WD SmartWare” problem. It might even take less time than your suggested procedure (the procedure you describe is actually quite brilliant, by the way).
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Friday, March 05, 2010
Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1TB Portable USB Drive WDBABM0010BBK-NESN
After purchasing this drive, you will find a nice little surprise… it’s advertised as a feature but if you want to delete it… think again…
Who’s brilliant idea was it to ■■■■ up 663.3MB with this software. You can’t even delete it. They said they listen to their users and responded. Providing software to hide the volume is a half-assed response on partially deaf ears (must have gone deaf about the part where users are asking how to DELETE their software). They only heard what they wanted to hear. You are still missing over half a gigabyte (512MB = .5GB). Unusable, and do they think their solution is the best one and/or it is something ALL users want.
This “SmartWare” is Western Digital’s way to inflict their backup and security solution onto unsuspecting consumers. You know about it because it is prominently advertised as a great new feature but you are in for a rude awakening if you have no need for it and want to delete it and claim back precious disk space. The software appears on your desktop as a separate volume. Don’t want to use it or see it, let’s just eject it… whoops, it’s back, you cannot eject it even after the main volume is ejected, WTF is that about.
To get “around” this, you have to run two separate apps that you download from their site. One is to update the drive’s firmware first and the second app allows you to hide and unhide the volume. Backup and security software is supposed to run silently in the background. It needs to stay out of your way not jump in your face, are you listening Western Digital. This is what happens when proprietary gear heads get locked together in a dark room. A monkey with a Ouija board could have seen the backlash with a bonehead decision like this. If there wasn’t a backlash why would they provide software to hide the volume.
Funny how the marketing group decided to exclude this little tidbit of information from consumers. Sales figure would be much lower if they prominently marketed this feature. “By the way, we have included WD SmartWare, an ingenious method to force our way on you because 1) You cannot remove this software, 2) You can only hide it so the usable space itself is still 663.3MB less than advertised, 3) The SmartWare mounts on your desktop as a Virtual Drive and you cannot eject, if you try it will simply remount itself and annoy, irritate and bug the ■■■■ out of you.
The SmartWare volume itself says it is 237.5MB but Get Info reports 663.3MB is used, the rest is used for the SmartWare version for Windows and other overhead. That’s right, you get two copies, what a bonus!! what a waste of disk space!!.
Another irritating thing is the plug that connects to the drive, it’s proprietary, you cannot use a standard micro or mini USB plug, it also does not stay securely connected. Turning the device over disconnects the drive and then you have to fiddle with it to reconnect. Why would you do this, you are asked to verify the serial number of your device before you try to hide the SmartWare volume. Another FAIL for Western Digital. Quality Control and Quality Assurance took a back seat here.
All of management needs to go, with thinking like this running through the top, you know you are in trouble. I’m going to vote with my wallet, Western Digital just lost a customer.
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@ep1curus : Is the proprietary connector you refer to, a micro-USB plug/socket?
My 500gb WD Passport external HDD has a Micro-USB plug/socket, which I prefer because it securely clicks into place and has been designed for more connect/disconnect cycles than the Mini-USB connector.
I couldn’t agree more with ep1curus. It’s one thing to bundle your product with marketing ■■■■, it’s another to force you to use it.
Even worse, at our company, we had some remote users who needed drives and someone in IT ordered these. Unfortunately, these users (like many corporate users) do not have admin rights to their PCs. This makes the drives useless. Other USB drives without this malware included work fine.
Way to go WD!
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First (and last) post:
My friend gave me one of these WD drives because it wasn’t working with his Mac Airport setup. I plugged it into my linux laptop and got this little autorun cd showing up and auto mounting itself. Needless to say I wasn’t impressed so I dove into it to figure out what it was and why it was doing it. After some googling, I came here and read through this lively discussion and tried a few things.
The first thing I did was to use fdisk and some mkfs utilities which did nothing more than he was able to do on his mac. Still got the little bugger auto mounting.
Next I used the wiping utilities and procedure UnexpectedBill laid out to clean off the disk. I plugged it back into the WD usb controller and the little bugger auto mounted again! According to my /var/log/messages, it was mounting a 700mb partition named /dev/sr1 instead of the expected /dev/sdb. Hmmm I said.
Finally I took the drive and put it into one of my spare Nexstar enclosures and mounted it. That time it showed up as /dev/sdb and was a proper hard drive for once.
From what I can tell, the partition was crafted by this WD usb controller so the only way to really get rid of it is to wipe the drive fully and use another brand of enclosure. The Nexstar brand is very good because of their rugged design and eSata port. I gave him his drive back in the new enclosure and tossed the WD case.
Also, for a larf, I tossed a working Seagate drive onto the WD card and it wouldn’t mount at all. According to my messages, it couldn’t mount because access to the logical unit was not authorized. That’s as far as I’ll take this one.
Peace
ealier I wrote …
"@ep1curus : Is the proprietary connector you refer to, a micro-USB plug/socket?
My 500gb WD Passport external HDD has a Micro-USB plug/socket, which I prefer because it securely clicks into place and has been designed for more connect/disconnect cycles than the Mini-USB connector."
I have to apologise to ep1curus beacause although the connector is not a proprietary connector, its does fail remain connected as ep1curus described.
I’ve had my 500gb WD Passport external HDD fro about a month now, but because of this and other issues, I’ve decided to return it and never buy a Western Digital portable USB hard drive until Smartware is fixed and they return to using mini-USB.
I have a WD My Book Elite sitting on my desk…I call it ‘Chucky’
It’s a nasty little thing which I paid a fortune for so I could back-up my genealogy files.
I am not a techy minded person, just a 60 year old who wants an easy back-up facility.
However…I have had soooo much frustration with this Smartware in the last few days I’d willingly boil the thing in RINSO if it would clean the drive of this unwanted programme!
Even uninstalling Smartware doesn’t seem to work:cry:
After talking with Western Digital tech support and ws told there is NO way to remove the Smartware and Virtual CD from the drive, I solved the problem myself. I took the 2 Mybook Essentials 2TB drives that I had just purchased and returned them for a full refund.
PROBLEM SOLVED!
But I do hate that Western Digital has lost me as a customer after 20+ years. They are going to lose a little business since I personally purchase around 20 drives a year, plus recommend drive purchases for my customers.
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I hope any of you can give me some advice.
I have an extern hard disk MyBook Essential 1.5Tb for Windows Vista. The data was protected with the Smartware Software using a password.
But the disk fell down (just half a meter…) with the USB cable still on it (but not connected to the computer) and the USB port got broken. I could not access to the data any more, so I asked for help and one colleague took it out of its enclosure and connected the drive directly to the computer port. The disk was found but any data could be seen. I asked some more people in the computing centre of my institute and they tried with a data recovery software without success. I can not give many details about the process because I was not there when the disk was inspectioned. They just told me that it was impossible to find anything probably due to this encoding, and it may be possible that the data are OK and still there, but they cannot access them. I ask the WD support, and they gave me an estimation of 1000 euro for the recovery… I am student and one part of my phd work is in this drive and I can not pay so much money now…It would be great if someone could give me some hits. Could be possible to get rid of the Smartware without destroying the data? what about getting just a new enclosure? Thanks a lot in advance!
I may a test to change the drive by antoher one and it possible !
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remove the drive WD off the box (for me a WD caviar green),
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add the new one Drive (For me an old drive barracuda seagate 500GB)
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connect the MyBook(bullsh*t) Essential on pc with windows 7
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now go on website WD and download the new firmware.
for the my book essential :
http://download.wdc.com/smartware/EssentialElite_FirmwareUpdater_v2.003%281.0.8.0%29.zip
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then run the program.
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follow step by step the indication (unfortunately you need to format the drive)
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at the end of the program you will see a pop up : the firmware update failed.
But if you restart the Mybook essential you will see a new drive appeasr in windows 7 explorer with a 500 GB barracuda …
and a [deleted] VCD but without smartware.
Yes !
I am very pleased to inform that this (UnexpectedBill’s) process (while not for the faint of heart) works like a charm. In fact, I didn’t even bother putting the drive back into the WD enclosure. Instead, I installed it into the extra hard drive slot in one of our Dell PC.
As for OS, I installed a Debian file server and wrote a few nifty scripts to allow all the network users to zip files back and forth (“back and forest” as my 4yr old likes to say) via the local connection. (Buttery good if I do say so myself.)
A quick side note to save you a little bit of time, I first tried this method using the built-in mini USB connection w/ the beta version of DBAN (dban-beta.2007042900_i386.iso), as the new version of DBAN claims to be able to handle USB devices. However it didn’t work. I’m not sure if this is due to a bug in DBAN’s USB recon, or if it has something to do with mini USB. So, at this point, this method does require you to remove the drive from the enclosure and attach it to a working SATA connection.
It’s just a shame that WD doesn’t just fix the problem so we don’t have to go to so much trouble.
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to you (UnexptectedBill) for sharing your experience. Kudos.
Regards to all, Matt
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For a “My Passport Essential”:
How on Earth do you connect the HDD to anything else?
And where on Earth did you see a FireWire port on the *** ?
There is a picture of the connectors here:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Storage/Hard_Drives/Q_25235381.html
It’s exactly like mine, non-standard. I went to 5 - repeat 5 - shops and 2 workshops.
Nobody could sell me a box and/or cable which would connect to that.
Please help.
Add me to the list of unhappy users. The backup program ■■■■■ and it ■■■■■ even more that you can’t delete the useless VCD.
Joe
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Yeah I got this drive at costco today and found out I could not remove this software (after searching and wasting 3 hours of my time, thanks alot!). If a fix for this is not posted by 90 days from now, I for one and i’m sure many other who do not have the time for this will just return this ■■■■.
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