My Passport Won'T Work How To Get Linux

Good luck level 2 24 points 7 years ago Some Googling tells me youre probably right.

Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts Log in sign up User account menu 382 PSA: Avoid WD Passport drives.

You cant reformat them for use as just a normal drive with Linux.

They offer some tools to disable the loading of the hidden partition (if you have access to a windows machine), but even then you still cant recover the space used by the partition.

Oh the irony. Heres some more reading for those who are interested: EDIT: Found a way to fix my drive, but it requires a physical Windows box (virtuals wont cut it).

Plug the drive into a Windows box.

Windows 7 64-bit was what I used).

Download, install, and run the firmware updater here.

Reboot. Download, install, and run the SmartWare updater here.

You might also need to install.Net from here.

Im not even sure if this step is 100 necessary, but its what I did so Im listing it.

Select that. Now you should see your drive and itll show as 2 partitions.

For my 2tb, it was one 32gb RAW and the rest was unallocated.

Delete both those partitions.

Im now able to read and write to it from my linux box so that was good enough for me, but Im sure I could now format it to ext4 if I wanted to.

Im helping a friend get a Linux based media player setup (micca ep600 g2) which reads NTFS so keeping it NTFS lets him use it with his Windows laptop as well which is plus.

Still, its ridiculous to have to jump through so many hoops just to use a damn USB drive.

TL;DR; Save yourself the headache and avoid the WD Passport (WDBY8L0020BBK-01) get the Seagate instead.

My Passport Won'T Work How To Get Linux

It just works. 166 comments share save hide report 82 Upvoted This thread is archived New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast Sort by best level 1 Comment deleted by user 7 years ago More than 7 children level 2 224 points 7 years ago This reminds me of the joke on how to get linux help.

Dont say you need help doing the task (reformatting a WD passport drive) as your responses will be to google it or RTFM.

Instead boldly claim that it is impossible to do so (you cant reformat a WD drive) and then wait for some expert to quickly and clearly prove you wrong with clear instructions on how to do it.

Continue this thread level 2 25 points 7 years ago Maybe they changed something recently then if OP just got them and youve had them for a while.

Continue this thread level 2 3 points 7 years ago I have one as well.

Ive had my 2TB My Passport drive for about 4 months attached to a Raspberry Pi.

I repartitioned with fdisk to a single primary, setup LUKS, and then formatted that with EXT4 without any difficulty.

OP needs to cool his shit and stop blaming others for his own problems.

Are you sure its not the host protected area That can be modified using hdparm.

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