I wanted to share my experience with this stupid icon problem. Even though it’s a minor change to my system, it’s still a CHANGE, and WD has no business doing stuff like the icon change and Virtual CD etc. Why, why, why??? JUST GIVE US THE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES PLEASE WD !!! And the whole idea of the Virtual CD is just a silly design because even if you actually USE WD’s software, once you’ve installed it why would you want the virtual installer disc to keep coming up every time you power the drive up!!! Their software engineering thought processes just baffle me.
Anyway, the post above about running the Turbo Drivers installer and using the Uninstall function was very helpful, thanks to the original poster (the install and uninstall buttons are right next to eachother once you launch the installer; I just ran it, did the Uninstall, rebooted, and my original Mac icon was back!!!). Yes I’m aware that you can paste a custom icon on any Mac file or folder, but like him I was looking for a true solution (not a workaround) that gets my Mac back to the original factory default icon for external drives, and this did it. Of course by doing so, you are removing the Turbo Driver that is installed automatically with the Smartware. Whether or not the Turbo driver is helpful is another question.
The manual pages 44-47 that the original poster gives a link to indeed do say the the Turbo Driver is automatically installed when you install the WD Smartware. But on my current My Book Studio model (early 2011, with the customizable window on the front), the manual makes no reference to Turbo Drivers anymore, not sure if they are still used or not…I would assume so, since the Turbo Driver is still included in the software Extras folder). Also note that you cannot download the Turbo Driver installer/uninstaller directly from the WD Support page for my current My Book Studio model. I had to enable the Virtual CD, power cycle, then open the VCD to find the Extras folder as mentioned by another poster on this page. So the Turbo Drivers standalone installer/uninstaller is still included on the VCD Extras folder with my model, but it is no longer mentioned in the manual.
My icon was fine until I installed the WD Smartware that comes with my newer My Book Studio 1.5TB (I only installed it just to give the drive a custom label and to change the number of minutes in which the drive automatically goes into sleep mode). But even after I had made those changes and uninstalled the Smartware, it did not restore my original factory Mac icon for externals.
One final note. Based on my experience, Time Machine has nothing to do with the icon problem, since I don’t use it. It was the #$$%^@#$ Smartware (perhaps more specifically, the Turbo Driver part) that comes with current WD externals that changed my icon, I know that for a fact. Prior to the WD Smartware, the Turbo Driver was a standalone thing, included along with WD Drive Manager. Now both the Drive manager and the Turbo Driver are combined in the Smartware. I tend to be leery of installing anything on my system that isn’t necessary (i.e. Macs don’t need any “special” drivers to use externals), but maybe this Turbo Driver if it really works is a good reason for me to keep the Smartare installed….maybe these software designers know what they’re doing, but they aren’t so good on the user friendliness aspect, i.e. why would you force a system-wide icon change on us !???
How frustrating!! Between this and the whole Virtual CD thing (which WD refuses to change despite I’m sure what has to be hundreds if not thousands of complaints and negative posts), I would normally switch to a different brand. But I stay with WD for these reasons. All hard drive brands have a failure rate, some worse than others, and WD’s seems to be at least on par if not better than other brands. So at least as important as the failure rate is that the company stands behind its warranty if and when you DO have a problem, and in my experience WD does. I’ve never had one of their drives fail altogether, but an older one I had was acting up and unmounting when it shouldn’t. It was still under warranty, and WD lets you give them a credit card number and they’ll ship out a replacement drive (in my case, since I was near the end of the 3-year warranty, the replacement was a current model with larger capacity, and brand new, nice !!!). This way if you can still access the problem drive, you can copy all your data over to the new one, and as long as you return the faulty one within 30 days or so they won’t charge your credit card. Now that’s excellent service. Do you think Lacie or iomega or Seagate will do that? Maybe they do, but I bet there’s a good chance you’ll get a refurb if you can even get them on the phone. On one drive they even automatically sent out a replacement Firewire cable to my registered address when they discovered a problem with a batch of cables. And their phone reps have always answered my calls within a few minutes. That’s good service. I’m sticking with WD.
