second exodous
Advanced Member
The other day I ordered a portable drive for my Pandora and just got it and first plugged it into my Linux box. I went with the sightly more expensive Elements drive because reviews said there were no partitions that needed special tools to get rid of but it turns out the one I got did.
No problem, I just have to find someone with windows to get rid of it for me. I have a friend with a Mac that virtual boots windows so I asked if I could borrow his computer and plugged it into the Mac. After plugging it in the mouse and the keyboard stopped working, no matter where I plugged them into. I unplug the drive and the keyboard and mouse worked again, weird he says, that has never happened. When I go to unplug the cord from the drive I notice that the port on the case is really really loose, like a LOT of play, more on this later.
So, hunting down another friend with windows I finally get to formatting the drive with the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool from the linked article above and went to formatting. It got to the last bar and it wouldn't go any farther, it froze windows. I've used this tool 2 times before and it worked great.
I decide it is just the case with the loose USB port and I think who cares, I plan on popping this out and putting it in my eee box for more space and then moving it's drive to a nice case that has eSATA but it still hasn't arrived so I plug it into my Linux box and it still has that weird partition. Grr. Well, I decide to pop it open because I think it is the USB port and it might work in a spare USB 2.0 case I have.
I have done this to many many drives that are tamper proof. Normally they are standard drives with little SATA to USB bridgboards that come off and wallah, standard drive. This one however has the SATA ports removed and a bridgeboard soldered directly onto it. The bridgeboard is wafer thin, like 1/3 the thickness of a standard circuit board and that is why the USB port is so wobbly. It is also not the standard thickness of a 2.5" drive, the reason I didn't order the 1GB version, it wouldn't fit in my eee box PC.
So I put it all together again, check the case before I did to make sure there was no scaring so WD can't say I opened it, and I'm going to send it back. It was broke before I even opened it so I think it is ok. Makes me a little mad though, the bare drive was a little more than the one in the case but I guess from now on I order bare drives with nice enclosures.
No problem, I just have to find someone with windows to get rid of it for me. I have a friend with a Mac that virtual boots windows so I asked if I could borrow his computer and plugged it into the Mac. After plugging it in the mouse and the keyboard stopped working, no matter where I plugged them into. I unplug the drive and the keyboard and mouse worked again, weird he says, that has never happened. When I go to unplug the cord from the drive I notice that the port on the case is really really loose, like a LOT of play, more on this later.
So, hunting down another friend with windows I finally get to formatting the drive with the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool from the linked article above and went to formatting. It got to the last bar and it wouldn't go any farther, it froze windows. I've used this tool 2 times before and it worked great.
I decide it is just the case with the loose USB port and I think who cares, I plan on popping this out and putting it in my eee box for more space and then moving it's drive to a nice case that has eSATA but it still hasn't arrived so I plug it into my Linux box and it still has that weird partition. Grr. Well, I decide to pop it open because I think it is the USB port and it might work in a spare USB 2.0 case I have.
I have done this to many many drives that are tamper proof. Normally they are standard drives with little SATA to USB bridgboards that come off and wallah, standard drive. This one however has the SATA ports removed and a bridgeboard soldered directly onto it. The bridgeboard is wafer thin, like 1/3 the thickness of a standard circuit board and that is why the USB port is so wobbly. It is also not the standard thickness of a 2.5" drive, the reason I didn't order the 1GB version, it wouldn't fit in my eee box PC.
So I put it all together again, check the case before I did to make sure there was no scaring so WD can't say I opened it, and I'm going to send it back. It was broke before I even opened it so I think it is ok. Makes me a little mad though, the bare drive was a little more than the one in the case but I guess from now on I order bare drives with nice enclosures.
