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#1
Make a WD My Book Ext Drive behave as a generic USB drive
Greetings. I have a Western Digital My Book 3TB USB 2/3 External drive.
It is USB 3 capable but for now, I have to use it as a USB 2 device as those are the only ports I have and it is supposed to work with both.
Like many people (from my reading) sometimes the drive is "not recognized" by windows when I plug it in. Of course it is loaded up with "WD specific" software. One item is every time you plug it in it installs the generic USB drivers but it also tries to install a third WD "SES driver" which allows some "special capabilities" like renaming the volume. Real important high level stuff. Anyway, since windows 7 64 bit does not natively have that driver that third driver install fails. So every time you plug it in, it behaves like a new drive.
Now of course I could install all the custom WD software and that driver, but I just want the drive to work as a generic USB drive! I don't like installing hard drive level drivers that I don't know what they really do and will they impact any other drives I plug in. Now if the fact that it is not recognized 100% of the time is a hardware issue, I need to return it under warranty. But if it is only because of it trying to install and reinstall these drivers every time, can I make it stop?
Their support site tries to get you to "hide" and do some workarounds. But if I just re-format the drive and blow all the WD software away, will it then behave as a "generic" USB external drive? Or are those instructions buried in the hardware?
Thanks,
BJBBJB