So on my way to the store today I stopped in at a garage sale. There, sitting forlornly, was this black thing that looked like a book. I noticed it had a power brick and a USB cable attached, so I figured it must be a USB external drive.

I asked the lady what it was, and of course she didn't really know, but told me her son had all this stuff and has since moved away, so he told her to sell all the stuff he had left behind. I paid one dollar for it.

I got it home and plugged it in, and sure enough it's a 1 TB WD MyBook. Sweet.

Or so I thought.

When I went to check it out, it only showed up as a CD with about 450MB on it. When I tried to access it, a screen popped up asking for the password (Hint" 'girlfriend' ). No joy after a few tries.

So, since I didn't want to use the WD "Smartware" anyhow, I figured I'd just format the thing and use it as an ordinary external drive.

No joy there, either.

A little nosing around on the net reveals that this is apparently a major problem with these drives. The software/firmware is devilishly pernicious - you can't easily get around it, you can't access it w/o the password, and you apparently can't easily use it as a drive - it wants to do backups and syncs and it wants to do it its own way.

Compared to these guys, Microsoft is positively avuncular.

My next step is just to destroy the casing (I haven't figured out any way to get it open) and extract the hard drive. But before I do that, does anyone have much experience with these things? Any suggestions to put me on the path of righteousness before I break out the hacksaw?

can you just go into Disk Management and Delete/Format it?

if not that, then downloading something like Gparted and running it should work, but be careful you don't delete the wrong drive.

I've used MyBooks for years, just not WD's software. All drives have performed flawlessly. I'm also thinking you should be able to reformat/repartition the drive, either through Windows or perhaps using partition software.

Put away the hack saws and just re-partition the drive. You can use a free program like this one:

AOMEI Free Partition Manager

First delete the existing partition, then create a new partition from the resulting space. Quick format it in Windows and you're good to go.

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.

How about this?

http://support.wdc.com/product/downl...pid=111&sid=34

Seems odd to me that a supposedly 1TB sized hard disk can't be used for all its 1TB (or 860GB or whatever).

Again, I've used MyBooks for many years for backup, but not using WD's backup software (I've found xcopy does just fine).

There's been a bit of discussion about this, especially regarding this drive.

1. The "CD" takes up a whole partition (the only one that's visible), but it's less than half a gig.

2. Disk manufacturers tout their disk sizes using decimal notation, i.e., a 1 TB disk contains 1,000,000,000,000 bytes (more or less). However, computer systems (My Computer, chkdsk, etc.) all report sizes using computer notation, i.e., 1K =1024, 1M = 1024 x 1024 = 1,048,576, and so on. By doing the math 'backwards', 1 trillion (decimal) = ~931 G (binary notation).

If you were a disk manufacturer, would you rather sell a 1 TB disk or a 931 GB disk? (Same disk)

https://www.google.com/search?q=west...orgot+password

Apparently you need to download a reset utility that will wipe the drive and clear the password.

There is a great website out there that details a lot about what one can do with these drives, how to get them open, back up and running and how to get around things like this.

http://www.ransackery.com/western-di...a.htm#comments

it's not the best organized but there is a TON of information there. I've gotten 1 of my older drives back up and running, after getting my data off it first.