WD My Book 1 TB External Hard Drive: Uninstall WD SmartWare & Unlock Drive For Use
A friend of mine called the other day and asked if I would stop by to help him setup and configure an external hard drive he had purchased and unsuccessfully setup on his Mac desktop. Upon initial inspection I figured I would just uninstall the WD SmartWare software, reformat the drive, and set it up to simply act as a secondary drive. It turns out that the initial releases of the SmartWare software would require you to configure the drive using SmartWare so I instead of completely wiping the SmartWare software I decided to simply minimize the impact the SmartWare software would have on what my friend wanted to do which was simply have a secondary hard drive that he could copy files to. Below are a couple steps I took to minimize what the WD SmartWare software would do or require you to do before copying files to the external Western Digital hard drive. The first couple of steps are to make sure that the configuration we are starting with is from scratch and sense my friend started the install I wasn’t sure what had been configured so it was better to start over.