Win7 has decided my external USB HDD is a CD drive - how to fix?

Hi MacEachaidh, here is the easy way to kill the WD Smartware VCD crap - as I have heard from other users who did it.

Download the latest version of HP USB Disk Siorage Format Tool 2.2.3 and format your drive. Download from here Download HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool 2.2.3 Free - Windows-based Format Utility for HP Drive Key or DiskOnKey USB Device - Softpedia

( I haven't tried it on a WD HDD because I don't have one, and I had deliberately and intently stayed away from WD external HDDs because of this troublesome and obnoxious crap on it.)

So then, Good Luck.:)

Thanks for your suggestion, writhziden.

I've gone with Recover My Files for the moment. It seems to have found a lot of stuff, and I'm restoring to another drive. The pain of it though (and I imagine this is a Windows thing, to do with the way folders etc are deleted) is that it doesn't seem to be able to restore any hierarchical structure to the data; all folders are being restored at the same level, so child folders are now listed level with parent ones. This is a big problem, where the child folders had short functional names (sometimes as simple as "disc 01" and "disc 02") - there's no information to say which folder belongs with what, which I'm surprised and very, VERY dismayed at. To make it worse, maybe a third of the folders (so far) have been recovered without their original names - just as eight-digit alphanumerics. And there are well over 100,000 files.

If this is unsurprising to anyone else, well fair enough. But it's pretty shocking to me. Maybe I was expecting too much, but I'm looking at this now and thinking, with the work involved in putting it all back in order, that it may not even be worth the time. I'm spitting, I tell you.



Rueful smile, jumanji. That's why I was copying all the files off this drive in the first place - so I could try reformatting it. I didn't know I was going to smash the drive I was copying all the data onto, mere minutes later. :shakes head:

When I've finished Operation Despair, I'll revisit the idea of reformatting the drive.