I’ve recently connected my WD Drive to a PC again (Win 10) after it had been acting as a back-up USB drive for a NAS.
When connecting the drive it is recognised as a CD drive. I read the article re disabling the CD drive via either the WD SmartWare or a separate downloadable tool “WD SmartWare Virtual CD Manager for Windows”, neither of which works.
When I try and launch the SmartWare exe and go to “Set Up Drive” I get an error message: “No writable WD SmartWare partition found on your My Book Essential drive etc.” It asks to check the drive is formatted correctly and that it is unlocked. Running the Unlock application that’s part of the CD partition I am told that the drive isn’t locked.
Plan B was to download this Virtual CD Manager app, however, that also fails saying “You cannot configure your WD SmartWare VCD with the current version of your firmware…” It asks to upgrade firmware and try again but when I run the firmware check I’m told the firmware on my drive is up to date.
After this merry run around I’m no further to accessing the data on the drive, which I really need. Under Computer Management > Disk Management I can see a blank volume with status “healthy” that looks awfully like the 930GB of data that I’m looking for but I can’t figure out how to get to it. When trying to query the properties of said partition I get an error saying the Disk Management console view is not up-to-date and trying to refresh; obviously a refresh yields nothing.
Anyone any ideas as to how I can fix this (ideally without having to disassemble the drive or just force a re-format which would obviously delete all data)?