I just bought a 2 TB My Book Essential which is unopened at the moment. Like many others I did not want the VCD or Smartware with it.
But a thought occurred to me that maybe the VCD can be of some use.
Can I boot off the VCD? My BIOS can boot off CDs or USB drives (both flash drives as well as HDD). If I replace Smartware with my system recovery/disk image program that runs in a WinPE environment, it would be easy to restore my system disk. I can rename the program to smartware.exe if that helps.
In theory you could if you could change the content of the VCD, which is just a locked read-only partition made to look like a CD… So unless you can find a way to crack it and modify the partition, then not likely.
So is this VCD going to screw up booting from the disk completely; i.e., is the MBR and track 0 taken up by the read-only portion of the VCD?
I can write to the MBR and track 0 of my new My Passport drive after I reformatted and cleaned the drive. But I don’t know if that shut down the VCD or I was just lucky in getting one without the VCD, which I learned that WDC is now shipping.
The Passport model number is WDBACX0010BBK, 1 TB My Passport Essential.
The drive had a file on it called VCDVersion.xml saying it was version PPCRR2A.1.4.1.1
But after reformatting with the HP USB Storage tool and cleaning with Diskpart, I have seen no evidence of the VCD. Running WDC’s firmware updater and Virtual VCD Manager both returned saying no Smartware drive was found. I also have a full terabyte of storage.
I am 80% confident that this drive is bootable. I am trying to use a syslinux boot loader to link to my software and I haven’t quite got that working yet, but I’m pretty sure the boot loader got loaded.
If this Passport drive indeed did have a VCD, then I planned to use the same procedure with the 2 TB My Book Essential.
