Hi Mary I'm guessing you have a MyBook drive. Now, before we go any further I wouldn't deny that it's always going to be the case that some of them last forever, while others die very quickly. It's also completely fair to say that it can depend upon how much stress you put these things under. And it's also fair to say that WD does offer a very good product warranty on their hardware. I don't want you to think I'm knocking this stuff for the sake of it, far from it. I'd be the first to admit that I could have just been unlucky. But as Lynne will tell you I think, we've lost some pretty valuable data before now as a result of those WD drives dying on us. Not the least of which was a copy of a boot disk which we could have done with right now actually as our Asus NetBook is flat on its face because of some strange Windows issue that's killed it. I can't even get it to recover, which is odd because I took what I thought was every possible precaution.
But getting back to the point. I have to admit that their NAS servers do look nice and I'm going to look to see what the prices are like in comparison to, for instance, the Promise drives. The Promise drives have the advantage of having a Thunderbolt interface now, which makes a lot of difference to us since our machine is thunderbolt-ready. But we will see. That's a different discussion. Yes, the hidden partition is definitely there, even on the new Passport drives. It's only small but that's not the point, it shouldn't be like that. You can't get rid of that partition because it's hard coded, so to speak. But no, you definitely do not need to install their software to use the drives. Gordon On 19 Aug 2011, at 19:27, Mary Stores wrote: I bought a WD Drive last year, and it does have a hidden partition. In addition, it says you have to install this organizing software in order to use it. I found the software to be inaccessible, and I also found you did not have to install it to use the drive. Other than that, though, I've had no problems with the drive. I got it to store books and music. It's a desktop version, but still small enough to move if I need to. _______________________________________________ The Techno-Chat E-Mail forum is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free To modify your subscription options, please visit for forum's dedicated web pages located at http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/techno-chat You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Techno-Chat group since the 12th of April 2010, at: http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/techno-chat/index.html
