format WD usb hard drive

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hunter55

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Nov 5, 2013
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I have a usb WD My Passport Elite hard drive which was originally set up on a macbook. It worked ok there.
I would like to use it as an external hd for my W7 pc. I reformatted the drive as FAT32 on the macbook but this left WD Smartware on the drive. (I gather this makes the drive into a virtual CD drive.)

When I plug the hd into my pc, it shows up as a CD drive and takes forever (>5mins) to list the contents of the drive - this makes it totally unusable.

I have used the WD Quickformatter app on the macbook but this did essentially nothing.

Is there any way I can reformat the HD so that it will work as a normal usb external drive on the pc? I don't care if it is no longer useable on the macbook.
 
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hunter55

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Nov 5, 2013
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Thanks for your quick reply.
Problem is, when I plug it in to the pc, how do I format it as anything? I can't find the format option when it appears as a CD drive.
 
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hunter55

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Nov 5, 2013
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When I go to device manager, the WD drive shows up under "Disk Drives" and "DVD/CD ROM drives". If I right click on either of these, the only options are to Uninstall or Disable, I Disabled the WD under DVD/CD but cannot Uninstall it. - Unistal does nothing but say it is uni stalling the device.

I can not find a format option anywhere
 
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raemac

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Feb 8, 2014
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I had the same problem. WD has the solution for various operating systems here http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/search/1/a_id/3865/c/130/p/228,209,302


 
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