WD MyBook Essentials - Can't use after swapping drive

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

Doing this for a friend of mine. He wants to use the external as an internal, with a smaller disk as the external. Computer in use is windows 8.1

Removed 2TB drive from enclosure, and replaced with another WD 80GB drive, plugged everything in. Windows wanted to initialize the drive for first use. I tried to and i got access denied. Opened File Explorer, and it shows the drive as being a corrupted CD drive, which cannot be accessed.

I understand that the VCD present on the original drive cannot be added to the drive, and that is fine. I just want to be able to use the drive within the enclosure.

As a side note, before the 80GB drive was placed into the enclosure, it had a single NTFS partition on it with one small file sitting on it. The original 2TB drive will still work perfectly fine if i place it back into the enclosure.

Did I do something wrong in this procedure?

2

WD SmartWare drives are designed to work together for security and encryption, and the individual components are not supported independently from one another.

Regards,

3

I understand that this configuration is not officially supported. Both security, and drive encryption on the device are now, and always have been disabled. Security, and encryption in this case are not an issue.

I just want to know how to get this configuration to work. I saw another post here where someone did something similar, and their only issue was that they couldn’t put the VCD onto the smaller drive.

The owner of this device has never ever used the VCD, or the software on it for any reason, and doesn’t bother with security, or encryption on the drive.