Unused WesternDigital Passport 320GB USB exterrnal HD for sale

[Doron Shikmoni]

On 21/03/2011 13:49, Ehud Karni wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Mar 2011 23:30:35 Stan Goodman wrote:
>>
>> The manual has a chapter about converting the drive to use with Mac
>> boxes, how to reformat, and how to opt out of the "smart software". What
>> it says one cannot do is avoid the need for a password. I am rethinking
>> my offer of sale, reformating, and giving the  "smart software" the deep
>> six. If the hidden partitions won't bother me, I can pretend that they
>> aren't there.
>
> I think you are wrong here. My understanding is that the "SmartWare"
> software is erased and you can reload it.
>
> My experience with other WD usb disks (not Passport) is that formatting
> it with fdisk (I did it on 1.5 TB disks) to 1 partition does work as
> expected - nothing is protected.

He's not wrong. At least, not entirely wrong.

WDC, in their infinite wisdom, recently added a brave new feature into
some of their external HD sub-brands. It's actually a couple of features.
One, is that the firmware presents not one but two devices to the host:
One Virtual CD drive and one HD drive (a bit like U3, though not entirely).
The VCD contains the bundled software. For Windows, naturally.
The other is that the HD drive does not look like a generic mass-storage
USB device, like the rest of them. Instead, it presents a SCSI layer, which
calls for a WD SES driver. Available for Windows and OSX, naturally.
One can still mount and use it as a generic mass storage, but depending on
your OS kernel, the SCSI layer may still call for a driver.

Regardless of the wisdom of doing it this way, this presents a somewhat
messy interface to non-{Windows,OSX} users. The VCD can be eliminated by
updating the firmware (which sometimes works), the SES driver issue can't
(for now).

For Linux users, -- pick up the "Elements" sub-brand, not the "Passport" or
the "My Home" ones.

Doron