External Hard Drive with Dumb Ass Copy Protection

Doronron

Thought I'd ask here instead of the Help/Advice forum. I figure I'd get an answer here quicker.

I just picked up a new external hard drive for use with my iMac's Time Machine feature. However, this drive comes with a copy protection scheme (HybridDrive) that automatically mounts an ISO, forcing the user to log into virtual CD to get to the hard drive -- the rest of the 500GB drive cannot be accessed without activating the copy protection. This means that neither my Mac nor my Windows PC can see the drive as a hard drive, only as a CD. Once logged into the CD protection scheme, then I can see the rest of the drive.

However, the mac version of the protection system does not recognize OSX 10.5 -- the highest it will go is 10.4. This means I can't even get into the drive on my Mac.

Does anyone know of a program or a method to remove a read-only partition and format the drive clean? It doesn't look like fdisk will do to the job. It doesn't matter if the program is Mac or WinPC. As long as I'm able to get rid of the CD Partition and make the hard drive viewable.

Janin

Just send that back and get a drive that doesn't try to mess with you. Or a NAS, if you're feeling adventurous. There's no telling if it even supports USB mass storage - the copy protection could be the only way to access it at all.

jlrx

I would hate ANYTHING that tried to force some kind of copy protection on a hard drive? what kind of crap is that? buy a 500GB HD and have granny mc-pain-in-the-ass "protect" it? if its my HD that crap can go to hell. Try partition magic, and fdisk should work if you have it, erase and format the entire drive, run an installation of vista or linux and in the setup process erase the entire drive and reformat it before canceling out, otherwise burn it. Buy a 20 dollar external drive case and pop in any old IDE into it.

Janin

jlrx wrote: »

I would hate ANYTHING that tried to force some kind of copy protection on a hard drive? what kind of crap is that? buy a 500GB HD and have granny mc-pain-in-the-ass "protect" it? if its my HD that crap can go to hell. Try partition magic, and fdisk should work if you have it, erase and format the entire drive, run an installation of vista or linux and in the setup process erase the entire drive and reformat it before canceling out, otherwise burn it. Buy a 20 dollar external drive case and pop in any old IDE into it.

I'm guessing that if the OS thinks it's a CD-ROM before the restrictions management software loads, the drive is presenting itself as a CD-ROM rather than mass storage. If so, no amount of fdisking will help here.

Return the drive, research for one that works, buy that instead. Think of it this way - if you keep the drive, that's $500 given to a company that is hostile to the user, and $500 less given to one that lets you access your own data.

Brodo Faggins

If Disk utility (os x) can see it, format that fucker.

Doronron

Yeah. Disk Utility can't see it. Doesn't look like Partition Magic or Ghost can see the drive without logging in first. I'm probably going to go ahead and return it. Now I know why the damn things were on sale for $110.

For future reference: avoid anything from Acomdata that has "HybridDrive" written on it.