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WD My Passport has an Administrator file(s) for an old laptop. How do I delete them?

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  • Laptops
  • Western Digital
  • Storage
Last response: in Storage
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October 12, 2014 9:05:13 AM

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I no longer have a laptop that had been backed up on my WD My Passport drive. I have been manually deleting the files from WD SmartWare.swstor folder. I ran into a folder that requires Administrator access and I do not remember the password.

How do I remove the folder and its contents to make room for a Windows 7 full backup of my existing laptop?

A snipet of the types of files with a "Date Modified" of 2008 are: Security Catalog, Setup Information, GPD and PPD files..

More about : passport administrator file laptop delete

a b D Laptop
a c 317 G Storage
October 12, 2014 10:25:26 AM

The only suggestion that I have is to reformat the drive, which will erase EVERYTHING on it. If your problem is a lost administrator password, the site rules don't allow us to suggest workarounds for it.
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October 12, 2014 10:55:11 AM

WyomingKnott said:
The only suggestion that I have is to reformat the drive, which will erase EVERYTHING on it. If your problem is a lost administrator password, the site rules don't allow us to suggest workarounds for it.


The only reason I did not want to reformat the WD My Passport drive is I have this current laptop backed up to it. If I reformat, then I will not have my last backup.

How do I reformat this type of drive? Can you point me to an easy way to reformat it? Then when that is complete, will all the WD software be removed and I can use Windows 7 Backup software to backup this laptop? I really dislike using the WD Smartware software that the Drive came with.
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a b D Laptop
a c 317 G Storage
October 12, 2014 11:05:39 AM

Bear in mind that Windows 7 backup will not make a whole system backup unless the backup drive has a higher capacity than the system drive. If you have a 500 GB system drive with 100 GB of files on it, Windows 7 backup will not back it up to a 250 GB drive. A bit strange.

You can use Disk Management re-initialize, partition, and format the drive. If you don't have admin access to your own machine (a bad position to be in), you can download Parted Magic, make a boot CD, and initialize the drive with that.
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