external hard drive question
 

hey guys, new to the forum.. and i have a quick question. Trying to use my external hard drive on Ubuntu for netbooks, and i seem to can't get it to work ( i am pretty new at linux also). The drive shows up and i see "WD smartware" with the eject button above it, but once i enter i don't see anything besides the smartware files. This is a Western digital 500gig mybook esentials NTFS format. Sorry if this question has been asked before... i'll do some more searching but any help on how to go about mounting this so i can use it? thanks in advance.

"Regardless of brand or model, the very first thing that you must do when you buy a brand new external hard drive is to format it properly for your system. Format and partition your new disk immediately, before you start using it for backup or for additional file storage. It is essential that you do this right away, before you start using the drive, because the formatting process erases everything on the external disk."

http://thelightroomlab.com/2009/01/f...al-hard-drive/
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http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/per...harddrive.html
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http://www.zorge.net/?p=22

The last one would be my preference. Best wishes with your linux experience!

The OP said it was already formatted as NTFS. Ubuntu should mount this o.k. using fuse. From a terminal session enter this (sudo will ask for your password) and post all the output

Actually the drive looks like two physical devices, a virtual CDROM drive that contains the smartware utilities and the real storage device. The smartware utilities will not work with linux. The data drive may not or may not be automatically mounted when it is plugged in. The output of the fdisk command or dmesg will tell you the data drive device ID.


Ref:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...re-how-814907/

Most external hard drive these days come already formatted. Generally <32GB is usually FAT32 and anything greater is NTFS.

this is what i get when i entered that in terminal:


phre0n@phre0n-laptop:~$ sudo fdisk ~l

Unable to open ~l
phre0n@phre0n-laptop:~$ df -hT
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6 ext4 38G 11G 26G 30% /
none devtmpfs 493M 312K 493M 1% /dev
none tmpfs 497M 140K 497M 1% /dev/shm
none tmpfs 497M 84K 497M 1% /var/run
none tmpfs 497M 0 497M 0% /var/lock
none tmpfs 497M 0 497M 0% /lib/init/rw
/dev/sr0 udf 443M 443M 0 100% /media/WD SmartWare

Western Digital puts its crapware into a virtual device that is located in the external drive's firmware. I don't know if the actual data is on a hidden partition on the physical hard drive or not, but you won't be getting rid of that crapware icon, or that crapware. The external drive reports itself as two devices.

For this reason, I rate WD externals as an "avoid".

You could always format that drive to remove that crapware if it's on a hidden partition. Try typing these commands if you want to get rid of it:

To determine the HDDEVFILE variable (/dev/<something>, and the whole device [for example, /dev/sdb, not /dev/sdb1]):

Then, to format the drive:

When you format the whole device instead of just one partition, you get rid of ALL the partitions in the process.

The correct syntax is a - not a ~

And just like U3, smartware can not be removed by just reformatting. It requires a special windows only utility.

You could also open up the drive and physically remove the chip that contatins the crapware as well.

I do not consider this to be good advice.

The link posted by michaelk in post #4 has the solution to removing the "smartware"

Call me dense or whatever. I'm confused, tredegar, what IS the solution referred to -- I do not want to vouchsafe the need to use a Windows app unless absolutely necessary. (The Mac OS ref or ?)

Will not Kenny Strawn's ubuntu example work?

Unfortunately you need either a mac or a windows PC to use WD's own software to "update" the software on their product and then use "WDSmartWareVirtualCDManagerforWindows-v1.0.7.4.exe" (or, presumably the mac version on a mac) to remove the VCD. I don't know if this gives you any additional storage space.


Instructions here: http://superuser.com/questions/44318...rom-my-desktop
WD's page for updates: http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/wdsmartwareupdate/

Unfortunately not. In this case to need a mac or a windows PC.

I'm with jiml8, then -- no more WD for me!
I certainly hope Seagate does not sell out, too.