WD My Passport Essential reformat on a MAC shootinstars Aug 30, 2013, 5:33 PM My external hard drive for my MAC (my passport essential 3200bmv) was stolen and later recovered by the police. How to format external drives using WD Quick Formatter in Windows or Mac Answer ID 3868 This answer explains how to use the WD Quick Formatter to format a WD external drive in Windows (8, 7, Vista, or XP) and Mac OSX (Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, Mt. Lion, or Mavericks).*END.
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Learning:. Webcasts:. Creativity:. Other operating systems:. Don't see your community listed? Or a subreddit for it, and when it has over 350 subscribers, and we'll add it to the sidebar. After tearing my hair out all evening trying to reformat this stupid drive, it turns out WD has decided to include hidden partitions that make reformatting it almost impossible.
They offer some tools to disable the loading of the hidden partition (if you have access to a windows machine), but even then you still can't recover the space used by the partition. GParted, Disk Utility, and Testdisk all failed to do anything and I can't even use mkfs.ext4 on the drive directly because it would appear the firmware 'protects' the disk from being reformatted. It's beyond infuriating.
WD calls this technology 'Smart Ware'. Oh the irony. Here's some more reading for those who are interested: EDIT: Found a way to fix my drive, but it requires a physical Windows box (virtuals won't cut it). Plug the drive into a Windows box. (Windows 7 64-bit was what I used). Download, install, and run the firmware updater. Download, install, and run the SmartWare updater.
You might also need to install.Net from. I'm not even sure if this step is 100% necessary, but it's what I did so I'm listing it. Reboot again. Now search for 'format' in the windows run box and you should find something like 'create and format drives'. Now you should see your drive and it'll show as 2 partitions. For my 2tb, it was one 32gb RAW and the rest was unallocated.
Delete both those partitions. (right click on them and delete).
It should now say it's totally unallocated, so just make a new partition and format it to NTFS and you're good to go. I'm now able to read and write to it from my linux box so that was good enough for me, but I'm sure I could now format it to ext4 if I wanted to. I'm helping a friend get a Linux based media player setup (micca ep600 g2) which reads NTFS so keeping it NTFS lets him use it with his Windows laptop as well which is plus.
Still, it's ridiculous to have to jump through so many hoops just to use a damn USB drive. TL;DR; Save yourself the headache and avoid the WD Passport (WDBY8L0020BBK-01) get the instead.
It just works. Uh yeah it works for just about anything.
If you want to ask a question and are too lazy to search for the answer, just make a 'wrong' statement about the subject and eventually someone will get upset and prove you wrong and then you have your answer. Saying something is impossible is a good way to do that. For example: 'It is impossible to do a quick sort in C' 'There is no way to run the Steam Client for Windows under WINE.' 'Ubuntu does not have paint, video editing, and an Objective-C compiler like the Macintosh has.'
'It is impossible to prove climate change is real.' 'Evolution is not possible because there are no fossil records of early life.'
'There are no movies about the French Revolution.' 'The formula for gravity does not exist.' I mean basically you pick something you want to learn about and then phrase your topic into one of the above sentences and just sit back and relax and wait, and someone will get upset and prove you wrong.
I call it 'Troll Research' or 'Trolling for Results'. Apparently not ' bills wrote: Also, WD is well aware that not everyone is happy with the VCD, and we do produce a drive that doesn't have it - the WD Elements drive. However, there's nothing that can be done to remove it, now, with the way it's designed into the drives. Thank you for actually answering my question and for the honest answer.
Above and beyond NOT being happy with the drive WD should note that I began this thread on January 20th 2010 and it took 8 months for an answer to come from anyone in WD.'