The first thing I thought of was deleting the partition and carrying on from there. Simple, right?

However:

1. The device appears to Windows as a CD, so disk management (or diskpart, for that matter) don't let you format a CD.

2. A little more snooping on the web reveals that the drive is somewhat special, in that the encryption/emulation hardware is resident on the drive's pcb. In other words, even if I removed it and tried to format it as a stand-alone drive, it probably wouldn't work.

WD sells stand-alone USB drives all the time. This thing is designed for a particular purpose: to be attached to your cpu and do constant backups. If you don't want that, you should buy something else.

I don't want that.

So, I guess I'll just use their software, restructure the drive so it's essentially new (with a now-known password) and just flog it on eBay or craigslist. Plenty of people are looking for this sort of thing.