Removing Wd Firmware Virtual Cd

[Nuisance Value]

Western Digital used to make good external hard disks. They came with crap on them but this crap was easy to delete. Not anymore.

Now the "My Passport Essential" and other new external hard disks come with crapware on a partition which pretends to be a read-only CD but isn't. It is just a partition but all my attempts at deleting it have failed. Linux tools all answer that the partition is read-only (fdisk, sfdisk, parted, gparted, u3-tool). Windows tools vary in their failure, some fail to see the disk at all, U3uninstaller.exe said there was no U3 device, DBAN only deleted the contents of the normally writable partition, etc.

It is not read-only in the sense that it can be upgraded by WD. If it can be upgraded it means it can be edited, and if it can be edited it means it can be deleted, right?

This VCD partition takes up 700MB, and not only does it mean one less movie I can store on this disk, it also means I cannot plug the disk into my VCR. Other usb data storage work fine but on this one the VCD gets in the way and my VCR won't have anything to do with it. Nor my camera.

WD offers a way to hide this VCD partition but this does not solve the problem. You have to hide it on every pc you plug the disk into and you can't hide it from VCRs or cameras.

Any ideas, please?

[Charles]

http://superuser.com/questions/44318/how-d...from-my-desktop

[Nuisance Value]

Thanks Charles, but this guy is just parroting the instructions WD give. Following these steps the VCD would become hidden, not deleted. And the other issues would remain.

[Charles]

Hrm, interesting. I was just going off a link I saw, since I don't have a WD external.

[Nuisance Value]

bump