WD External hard drive

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Tony
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Just purchased a second hand WD External Hard drive advertised as 1TB for my daughter to use. Having right clicked and looked at properties, it appears to not be so. However i could be doing something wrong.
Many of my other external hard drives doesn't have so many other folders on the drives as this one has. Check image. Any advice please.


External hard drive..jpg
 
Right Click on Windows Icon and select disk management to ensure the whole disk has active partitions:-
1615992730185.png
 
Looks like you are not seeing the main drive at all, but a virtual CD drive mounted by 'SmartWare' (hundreds of MB, not hundreds of GB).
 
Could it be that the WD software on the disk is taking up 'reserved' space and hence not showing as available?
 
This may be a similar issue:


SmartWare seems to be a discontinued WD backup application that uses a special partition that appears as a virtual CD drive.. But here the rest of the drive isn't visible.


Don't know if installing SmartWare itself (from that virtual CD) or Acronis for WD will help.
 
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I would just format it and see what happens assuming you can see it in explorer to do that.
What you are looking at shouldn't be called CD drive not to say you are looking at the wrong thing, the computer is confused by it.
 
:(Sorry, did not spot the virtual CD Manager and possible 'Locked' partition. Previous owner may have created a virtual CD using half the available space. Double-Click unlock icon and you may see what is on the virtual CD!

You can use Disk Manager to delete both volumes/partitions and then recreate a single partition that should give total disk usage.
 
I don't think this is a conventional partition that can be removed in the normal way; it's actually part of the firmware of the drive, and it's tiny (668MB, not GB). With updated firmware you can apparently hide it, but that may not solve the fundamental problem of not seeing the drive itself:

 
Probably needs a 'low-level' format to get around the embedded software, something like Acronis Disk Director.

Sounds a good idea - you need to mount the volume at a “root” level.

No use to the OP but I always erase/reformat any external hdd or ssd when I get it and wipe all the wd/seagate/samsung utilities that they provide. I had not had a wonderful experience with wd utilities.
 
I have Hitachi, 2 x Freecoms for a few years now, still run with out issues they are just a matter of plugin and play, purchased this one, and its full of extra and complication, i thought it was a 1TB, unless there are some hidden TBs, Will have ago at opening the WWD Smartware tomorrow just in case i am missing something.
 
I have Hitachi, 2 x Freecoms for a few years now, still run with out issues they are just a matter of plugin and play, purchased this one, and its full of extra and complication, i thought it was a 1TB, unless there are some hidden TBs, Will have ago at opening the WWD Smartware tomorrow just in case i am missing something.

Some WD drives are not designed to be used as bare drives, they are configured to work with specific backup software/routines ... take them out of that environment and they don't behave as expected. Your graphic shows lots of 'extras' on the drive that indicate this is one such, it needs formatting to remove those to be of general use but you probably won't be able to do that by 'normal' formatting, hence my reference to Acronis Disk Director, which can do low level formatting.
 
Hi Gramps. Yes, just gets more confusing, so am trying to return, ebay purchase.
 
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