How to clean up WD "My Passport Essential" USB HDD?

rip · 03-04-2010, 09:17 AM

Just a thought, but can the HD be removed from the Passport and then plugged into the mobo like a regular internal HD ? That would get the USB connection out of the way and maybe make it easier to reformat.

TB0ne · 03-04-2010, 11:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rip

Just a thought, but can the HD be removed from the Passport and then plugged into the mobo like a regular internal HD ? That would get the USB connection out of the way and maybe make it easier to reformat.

Very true, but when you go put it back into the enclosure, the USB bridging stuff may expect to see (for example) two NTFS partitions, but only sees one...it may go into a fault-state, and not work at all. The brains in the enclosure may not be too robust.

denver1980 · 03-26-2010, 08:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by catkin

When you plug in the WD320Go does it create a virtual CD drive?

Yes, it does in Winblows but i've set udev to mount only the 2 patitions.

Quote:

Originally Posted by rip

Just a thought, but can the HD be removed from the Passport and then plugged into the mobo like a regular internal HD ?

My drive is a laptop one ... not an IDE.

catkin · 05-04-2011, 11:39 AM

Apologies for necro-posting but I stumbled on this thread and realised I hadn't told the end of the story. It's not so exciting; I met someone who wanted the "My Passport Essential" for a Windows system and sold it to buy an Hitachi SimpleDrive mini instead (maybe the one that has just failed).

D27837 · 06-22-2011, 02:28 PM

Hopefully this isn't too late for those still searching for an answer... I have the 750GB Passport Essential and was not able to write to it. Long story short, and about to drive over it with my car, I tried a low-level format to get rid of EVERYTHING. Then re-partitioned and put an ext3 filesystem on it. After mounting on my Debian system I did chmod -R 777 to the drive, and now it's working. Not the prettiest solution but it worked for me and may work for you too.