Hi Martin
The hidden partitions, or actually I should call them protected partitions, not
just hidden, contain the WD software for Windows & Mac, plus the manuals. You
see the Windows software if you're running Windows and the Mac software if Mac.
But you cannot delete those partitions no matter what you do.
Now, it's only fair to say that not every WD drive I've ever had has failed.
In fact, the most common thing that seems to die is the power supply. WD seems
to under-rate the supplies. although I doubt that the supplies themselves are
manufactured by WD. Again, I am trying to be utterly fair here, I have had
Maxtor drives and one Seagate drive which have failed. But the vast majority
of failures seem to be WD in our case. Over the last couple of years we've had
at least 4 or 5 drives bite the dust.
Gordon
On 19 Aug 2011, at 20:56, Martin McCormick wrote:
I don't think I have ever had a drive fail in a way in
which the hidden partition would have been of any use at all had
there been one.
I had an 80-gigabyte Maxtor anda nother 300 GB Maxtor
both fail without warning by just simply refusing to read or
write any data. It was as if you had wiped the platters clean. I
suspect that the electronics module failed because you could
still hear the drive motor running normally and you could also
hear the heads move if you tried to check the disk. Had there
been a hidden partition, it would have gone away, also so that
drive would still just be the warm expensive brick it became.
I think those hidden partitions are only good if the
corruption is due to software issues.
Martin
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