western digital my book external drive

[DirtyElf]

hey i want to remove the virtual disc drive from my western digital my book and use it as a normal external drive.. i dont want to use the WD software..

ive heard that there is some way to do this, but i searched the WD website and couldnt find anything...

has anyone else ever done this, or heard of this?

also, it must be something new they have started doing because my old 250gb mybook has no virtual drive or anything...

 

[Solarstarshines]

have you tryed looking up free software for the virtual hdd? and also wouldnt this be in the registry as well im sure if you can find the extention and maybe manualy delete it or use software that will restore the drive to the original http://dvdxcopy.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/260338also try this it may help it also talks about how to get rid of it through hardware manager

 

[colinp]

hey i want to remove the virtual disc drive from my western digital my book and use it as a normal external drive.. i dont want to use the WD software..

ive heard that there is some way to do this, but i searched the WD website and couldnt find anything...

has anyone else ever done this, or heard of this?

also, it must be something new they have started doing because my old 250gb mybook has no virtual drive or anything...

I think you may find that it just too much of a problem to remove the smartware sw. There is alot of info on different forums that tell you how to do it, but most of them only hide the virtual drive and don't actually remove it. I have a "my book" and just said screw it and put up with it, I use it as a local drive for my WDTV. I just chalk it up to a mistake I won't do again and any other drives I bought since then, I made sure doesn't have any sw included. The WD elements drives are "bare-bones" drives with no sw or hidden virtual drives. But good luck in your searching, I'm quite sure there is a way to remove it.

 

[mjf]

I just buy the basic WD & Seagate drives and format partition at will- you actually pay for the rubbish software.

I haven't followed the technical issues but why can't you format the drive to make it a plain disk and uninstall any relevant software on the OS?

 

[colinp]

As far as I know, it's hard coded in the drives firmware, and WD doesn't make a firmware that doesn't have smartware by default. The only thing they are supposed to have is a dummy firmware that only hides the sw. I didn't really go into the specifics, but if you use any low level hd tools, you will find that smartware is still there. Formatting or repartitioning will not get rid of it. Again, I think it is possible, just not easy.