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Removing WD SmartWare partition

Z

Zyde

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 8, 2009
Messages
151
I really like the specs on this, and want a sleek/small portable hard drive with no separate power supply. Basically, I am sold on this hard drive, minus the SmartWare stories I have been reading about.

So the question is: has anyone else purchased a WD external HD with SmartWare pre-installed, and managed to completely remove the virtual CD partition (and not just disable the SmartWare) and free up the chunk of space that it occupies? If so, how did you do it? Please share your experience, thanks.
 
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AFAIK you cant remove smartware since its builtin the drive firmware.
 
I was one of the suckers who bought a WD MyBook that had that crap preinstalled. After a lot of research, no it can't be removed in any way. It's not on some partition that you can remove, it's built into the firmware of the drive itself. Meaning if you were to remove the stock drive that it came with and replace it with a bare WD drive, it wouldn't even run because the controller on the case itself looks for that firmware on the drive. Updating to the latest firmware does nothing, and WD pretty much has no plans to allow any way of completely disabling the software.

There is absolutely no way to remove it. And worse, there's no real way to "disable" it either, not without installing some software which only hides the SmartWare stuff from showing up, but even then it still loads when connected. Best of all, the freaking software takes up over a gigabyte of space, which I know isn't much when we're talking 1TB, but still. Over 1 GB for backup software? Come on. This pissed me off, not just because it couldn't be removed, but because this wasn't posted anywhere on the box. Just some kind of warning in small print would have been nice, but no. I love WD drives, but this was not cool.

Their "Elements" line does not have this issue. Only their MyBook/My Passport lines have it.


tl;dr: There is absolutely no way to remove it. Return it.


EDIT: Apparently, according to this page, their latest MyBook 3.0 drive does not have SmartWare installed.
 
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Thanks Jon55, I think I'll stay away from WD SmartWare drives based on what I have read.
 
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