External hard drive to regular drive

claptonman

claptonman

New Member
So I got a WD passport essential for free. (Lost and found at work, no one claimed it for a long time, manager told me I could have it.)

I cannot get into it, since it has Smartware on it. We could've used this to find the owner, but no getting into that.

So I originally thought it would be just a regular 2.5 SATA drive which I could take out and use as a spare drive. Apparently not. Seems like the USB is integrated into the whole drive, so no SATA ports.

Anyway to make this into a boot drive? I want to run some tests on some clean installs of windows, and cannot, since its only USB. Any tips?
 
Install windows on another harddrive, clone that harddrive and copy to usb harddrive using acronis true image(it clones fast), then set harddrive boot order in bios to boot from usb and disconnect other harddrives.
 
Is it one of those 1TB passports? Yeah they're odd drives. I don't really see any way to turn it into a standard drive.
 
No, its a 320GB. First of all, its protected by a password, and I cannot format it. Tried in Gparted and I needed to create a new... something. Sorry, forgot what it was, too tired right now. But it gives the error message on Gparted:

Input/output error during read on /dev/sdc

Any ideas?

Upon further reading, I can't even format a password protected drive. Dban didn't even work.
 
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From windows you should have the option to choose "forgot password", causing it to format. I'd imagine you should anyway.
 
Continue down the FAW. It might say there. Otherwise check the other folders.
 
Nothing in any folders or down further. In the manual, it does say if I forget the password, I have to delete everything. No instructions in how to do that.

And I ended up cloning my 750GB HDD and using that for some clean installs.
 
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