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[perkiset]

I purchased a 1T external WD today as a backup drive for a client. Annoyingly, a "WD SmartWare" CD-style mount displays whenever the drive pops up. It is completely locked, unchangeable.

So I went to the WD site: they had instructions, but they did not work. They had an updated firmware updater, it did not work (the deal is this is not actually a partitiion, it is part of the firmware that BEHAVES like a virtual CD - it's so that you'll always have THEIR handy-dandy backup stuff, oh, and logo, on your desktop, BTW).

Whether Windows or Mac, there is no removing it, because it's a WD problem. Check this thread that outlines the angst and frustration of several users on both sides of the aisle trying to remove it:

http://superuser.com/questions/44318/how-do-i-remove-a-mybooks-wd-smartware-virtual-cd-from-my-desktop

if you can believe it, the only satisfactory answer was to write a tiny Applescript that pops on the onMount event ... then dismounts the the virtual cd. So you don't see it, but your system is thrashing because about 2 seconds after you dismount it, it mounts again. As part of the firmware on the drive, it is untouchable by drive partitioning agents, disk managers or anything. It is an absolute Charlie Foxtrot.

Fair warning. You may resume party,
/perk

[nop_90]

Is it a rerun of way back in the early 90s where u needed some stupid driver for large WD drives to work.
And then the dos driver would thrash itself and all ur data was gone ?

[nutballs]

i generally avoid WDs after the dual Raid failure incident. Thats just stupid though.

[vsloathe]

Nearly every company does this anymore. Granted, on my Seagate drive it was not so hard to just tell it to ignore their silly software. Could be different over ESATA too.

[nutballs]

I still havent seen this?
I just bought 3 1tb seagates and they had nothing on them.

Though now that I think about it, I just plugged them into a raid, so they might have I guess, but just got sucked into the raid set and wiped the drives.

[vsloathe]

internal drives? I'm talking about a 1TB external seagate hooked up with ESATA.

[nutballs]

oh hah. missed the EXTERNAL part.

<move along nothing to see here>

[deregular]

My external 1tb WD came with that shit, I just did a format and no problems works a charm.

[perkiset]

Update: Downloaded the latest firmware updater and Virtual CD Manager and managed to get the crap off some new drives I was blessed with today. It's a really bad thing to do, but it's at least patchable now. That said, neither of the drives are the type that I had troubles with earlier, so there still could potentially be trouble there. The "Studio" version (in the black box, has a bit more advanced display) was the trouble - it worked today with the rather standard, 1T version of the drive.