The SmartWare Virtual CD Manager is a tool that lets you hide the VCD on your drive. Western Digital does advertise a Virtual CD utility on their site, which can disable the Virtual CDĭevice. I have killed the My Passport partition, which shows as unallocated Disk 5, but the extra CD-ROM is there. Which is why they will appreciate Windows-related tips on how to combat digital oppression. Most people having to fight this problem will be Windows users, Handful of tips and tools that could help.

Reading online and consulting with friends who have already had to tackle this nonsense before, I found a I also tried using GParted and it was unable to kill the SmartWare partition. The SmartWare is a virtual CD drive and read-only. For example, if you use the fdisk utility, you will only see However, the presence of twoĭevices was already a sign of bad things to come. Let's format the device and get rid of the unneeded stuff. There was the standard disk, which is what the simple consumer would expect:Īnd there was the absurdly named SmartWare, a UDF-formatted partition the size of a CD, containing all kinds of Well, I plugged the disk and, lo and behold, I had two devices showing up in Nautilus. Machine to examine the contents of the device is a very good option. Next, it is not uncommon to find Windows malware on external disks now and then. In fact, autorun and autoplay are enabled by default, unless you take the steps to It is not uncommon for preformattedĭisks to include an autorun file, which can trigger the execution of software on Windows machines with thisįunctionality enabled. If you have a Linux machine, use it first for examining the new hardware. With all devices by all vendors, if and when you stumble across a bad example. The tutorial explains how to do this with Western Digital (WD) disks, but the general approach should work well

Super-annoying menace of completely unnecessary vendor crap that is so audaciously bundled with sold hardware. I was angered, but this the experience gave me a superb opportunity to show you how you can handle the Partitioning tools could not detect or delete. However, I did not expect a hidden partition to be included, one that most conventional Well, I knew the device would come preformatted with NTFS and loaded with all kinds of garbage utilities that

Necessitate wiping some of those away or using a second hard disk. As the machine wasĪlready clogged with a quadruple boot, exploring new operating systems would Started using for multi-booting various Linux distributions off my RD510 laptop, including Ubuntu, Linux Mint and others. Just a few weeks ago, I bought a 640GB Western Digital 2.5-inch Passport external USB drive, which I Every now and then I head into my favorite local computer store and buy a handful of gadgets, mainly disks ofĪll kinds.

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