Accessing firmware on Western Digital 1TB?

[Mariane]

Hi everybody. I hope I am posting in the right part of this forum, when I read "accessing firmware" in the description I looked no further...

I have firmware problems with a 1TB disk from Western Digital.
My disk has on its label:
WESTERN DIGITAL - WD10TMVV- 11BG7S0
1TB SATA DRIVE WWN 50014EE - 2AECF - 4F58
DCM : EHBVJHNB
DCX : 0802G1T75
5VDC - 0.60A
S/N : WX51C1005928
Drive parameters: LBA 1953525168 R/N 701640

It came in an external hard disk wrapping called:
Western Digital 1TB My Passport Essential SE Portable USB 2.0 Hard Drive (Black)

I have no valuable data on it, it is new. But I paid 125 euros for it and I cannot return it to the shop because opening the casing has voided the warranty.

It has a micro-usb connector, as can be seen on the picture here:

WD.jpg (49.98 KiB) Viewed 19159 times

Once out of its casing it also has pin connectors. 2 rows of 6 + one isolated one of one side of the micro-usb connector, and a pair on the other side:

It has no power jack, when used within its casing it takes its electricity from the usb connector. On the other side there is a board nearly as large as the disk casing itself.

The problem with this disk is that it cannot be used via the micro-usb connector because it has a dual partition. One normal partition for data storage and one vcd (virtual cd) partition. The vcd is seen a read-only cd drive and some machines (cameras, VCRs, etc.) won't have anything to do with this external drive because of that. The vcd partition takes 700MB out of the 1T storage space, not a high percentage so this is a side issue. All my attempts at removing this partition, reformatting the whole disk, etc. have failed. I tried some Windows tools, including U3uninstaller.exe and DBAN, and some Linux tools (fdisk, sfdisk, parted, gparted, u3-tool). WD offers to its customers a way to hide the vcd partition but this does not delete it and this has to be done on every pc the drive is connected to. So it does not solve the problem for cameras and VCRs. After long researching online the only people who reported success deleting a vcd were saying that they had accessed their drive via the SATA connectors. But they were not talking about exactly this external hard disk drive, only about other WD products. One example of such advice was someone who said they had connected the disk in place of their usual internal hard disk and installed Windows XP on it. They said Windows XP reformatted the drive which could then be taken out of the pc, replaced into its casing and used as wanted.

Please advise me about how to do it with this disk.

Mariane

[Kazura]

If you have access to a Macintosh running Mac OS X 10.5 or higher ... Apple's Disk Utility *MIGHT* allow you to "fix" the drive. Just a thought ...

[Mariane]

bump

[drc]

Have you tried contacting WD support?

[granaryloaf]

Hi there, the virtual CD that loads is the WD SmartWare software that encrypts the content of the drive.

There is no way of removing this functionality as far as I am aware, however I have not actually ever attempted to do so, we normally just unlock then clone and return the device.

If you take off the PCB you will find an Initio chip, this provides the real time encryption/decryption of the data. The virtual CD is needed by the device to launch the authentication program that allows for access to your data. Without this I do not believe that the disk would work at all.

I don't think WD are transparent enough about how this system works with their end users.

[granaryloaf]

Here is an image of the chip (just in case you didn't want to remove the PCB)!

Attachments

IMG_1489.JPG (68.48 KiB) Viewed 19045 times

[ppumkin]

ditto
Its part of the drives architecture. Even if you manage to remove the partion i suspect you would render the drive completely unusable.(it could be a hardware chip emulating a partition too-like some flash drives act as cdroms to fool motherboards to thinking its an actaull cdrom and the hardware does the emulating not the software/this could be the case) i am not sure. Never worked with this model but have had similar ones with usb direct on the hdd pcb. Makes things more complicated in tracing faults.

[granaryloaf]

After reading this thread I dug out one of these drives that I have been using for testing and development.

There seems to be a utility to remove the SmartWare VCD partition. I don't know what the outcome of attempting it will be as I didn't have the time to try, but there is also documentation in there.

Have you looked through this?

[drc]

You sure it isn't the utility to hide it?

[granaryloaf]

You may be right, I have no way of checking until Monday.