My websearching shows that, while Apple does not appear to officially support the use of external USB devices for booting the OS, others have found they do work for this, at least sometimes as I found, as long as the GUID partitioning is used with Mac OS extended journaled formatting.

Your comment about needing administrator status to eject NTSF formatted USB devices is helpful. However, in my case the Windows partition was formatted with FAT32 so that I could also use it on my Mac (so I can transfer files between the Mac and the PC systems). Thus, I did not run into that problem.

I just found a solution to the problem of not being able to eject the WD Elite drive from my Win2k PC. I installed the WD “Drive Manager” software (downloaded for the WD support site). This produces a taskbar icon when the Elite drive is connected to the USB. Right clicking on this icon gives an option to “safely remove the device drive O:” (or smtg similar). Selecting this then gives a message re. “device can now be disconnected” (or smtg similar), which seems to work in that disconnecting no longer produces the error message from Windows re. “external device removed without properly being ejected” (or smtg similar). I am surprised that WD support did not offer this workaround to me, but I am at the moment pleased that I seem to have a working method to eject the drive.

Best wishes to all.

I don’t know if this is useful, but I also ran across this:
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“Can’t eject a removable NTFS media unless you’re logged in as Administrator”

By default, Windows 2000 allows removable NTFS volumes to be ejected only by members of the Administrators group. This helps ensure that casual or unauthorized users don’t inadvertently eject an important media from a system. If you need to give other users the ability to eject NTFS media, you can do so through a simple security policy change.
Configure the security policy

You can select which types of groups have the ability to eject NTFS media by modifying the local security policy. If the domain policy is defined, it takes precedence over the local policy.

1. Open the Local Security Policy console from the Administrative Tools folder.

2. Open the branch Security Settings\Local Policies\Security Options.

3. Double-click the policy “Allowed to eject removable NTFS media.”

4. Select the desired groups from the Local policy setting drop-down list. You can choose Administrators, Administrators and Power Users, or Administrators and Interactive Users.

5. Click OK and close the console.
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I don’t know if that’s of any use to you or not, but good luck anyway!

Does anyone know how to make this work as a boot drive?

WD tech support by phone was very polite, but told me they knew of no one who had got a WD external drive to work as an external boot device and asked me how I did it! They said they did not test their drives for this use.

The Elite has its own problem. Even though the box says it supported Win2k, while it works (with a DOS partition), it does not appear on the “eject USB device” icon menu. WD software support said they did not test it with Win2k and told me to shut down the computer before removing the drive, which for me makes the drive unusable.

Does anyone know how to eject the Elite drive in Win2k by some other means or make it appear on the USB eject menu?

I will not buy another WD drive.

The new Verbatim drive spun up and mounted no problem. I dropped a few jpg files on it and shut it down, then started it up again and opened the files. Everything seems fine.

So the next step is to buy a license for DataRecovery and (fingers crossed) transfer my recovered files to the new drive. I hope my next post will be to say that the files have been recovered and are sitting on the new drive.

I am curious when I get this done, should I attempt to reformat the My Book and see if it works? Or should I not even bother and just see if they will take it back? Any thoughts?

Thanks for the suggestions, much appreciated!
According to my notes (it’s been a long couple of days), I tried Repair Disk and at that time I got the same error message about “Invalid B-tree node size”. I did not do it from the boot disk.

Unfortunately, I don’t have another larger or equal capacity drive, but perhaps I can get access to one through a friend. Making a clone sounds like a great idea. So this Carbon Copy Cloner would have some way of accessing the unmounted drive?

I have a friend who says he can come over with a his copy of a data recovery program that saved his photo library.

I’ll admit that I am pretty nervous about trying to recover the data myself. My biggest fear is doing anything to make the situation worse.

Whatever I try, I will post a message saying how it turned out.

Best of luck to everyone struggling to rescue their data… it’s stressful!

In disk utility, have you tried repairing the WD disk that was reporting invalid b-tree node size? It can be found under the first aid tab. I would reccommend doing this from your OS X install disc (boot from the CD, then run disk utility from there). Sounds like maybe a bad partition.

You could also try to boot from a live Linux CD, such as ubuntu and see if it’s able to read the contents of the drive.

I’ve also received a reply from Carlos, the lone Western Digital support representative, so you’re probably right in saying he’s automated.

Lastly, if you have access to another external drive the same size or larger that your problematic WD drive, I would suggest using something like Carbon Copy Cloner (bombich.com) to make a clone of your WD drive before you go any further.

Good luck.

The whole point of the new drive was to free up space on my MacBook Pro, so with my data now stored on the My Book, I deleted the files from my laptop.

Yesterday I need to access one of the files I had moved to the My Book so I pluged in the usb cable and was surprised when only the VCD icon appeared… no drive icon. I looked under the Mac disk utility and sure enough the VCD was listed, but the drive itself was grayed out. So I looked at the stupid SmartWare software and it was telling me that the MyBook was empty!

I noticed at this point that the lights on the front of the My Book still indicated that the drive was about 50% full, so I was not in a panic yet. I know certain that I the data is on the drive.

So I rebooted everything but it still, only the VCD would mount. I wrote a description of my problem to WD’s email assistance and I’m pretty sure that the response from “Carlos” was an automatically generated response as it suggested I try all the things I had already tried and answered none of my questions.

I noticed that the SmartWare software has an update software button, but that just said it was up to date. So I was surprised when I visited the WD web site and saw that there was not only a software update, but a firmware update as well. I downloaded and installed the Mac versions of the updates and followed all the instructions. I ran the utility to by pass the VCD.

So now, just like they said, when I plug in the My Book, the VCD does not mount, so at least that is out of the way. But the drive itself is still not mounting.

This morning I opened the Mac Disk Utility again. I selected the “465.1 GB WD MY Book 111 Media” and clicked on “Verify Disk”. It came back with this:

Invalid B-tree node size
Volume check failed

Does anyone have any ideas what I can do next?
Is my data gone?
Do I need to just take this drive to a data recovery service?

Any suggestions, advice, or sympathy are greatly appreciated.
Thanks

I managed to get rid of any trace of the vcd, but unfortunately before I could copy the smartware software or install it. The only reason I need the software is to change the e-label. Can anyone send me the contenets of the vcd?

by the way, I got it off by entering this one line in terminal and then formatting using diskutil:

sudo sh -c “echo UUID=`diskutil info /Volumes/WD\ SmartWare/ | grep ‘UUID’ | awk ‘{print $NF}’` none hfs rw,noauto 0 0 >> /etc/fstab”

And just a little side note because I’m pissed off about this and really hoping WD reads this page at some point, One of the things Mac users take extreme pride in is the simplicity of both the hardware and software…the simplicity of use…the way you plug in something and it just works, and everything doesn’t need you to install drivers and perform 19 steps to get it going. WD should be embarrassed they put “for Mac” on their box. There is nothing “for Mac” about it. My LaCie didn’t say “for Mac” and worked just fine by just plugging it in. This MyBook is just a lie, and an un-simple piece of hardware. I feel duped.

The smartware program also runs like molasses and freezes all the time. I am going to use this drive with Time Machine so I am not interested in any of the features of smartware. i just want to change the label from Pictures 09 (which it shipped with) to “Backup”.

Anybody else having a problem.

Running 10.6.2 Snow Leopard

Would it be possible for someone to provide a complete summary of the process that does not refer to someone else’s post?

I’ll have to wait two years befor trying to make of my terabook (!) a usb-live hardened linux os on the fly! hate to these propertary shits.

Who knows someone hacking on it from/for linux? Some triks? (i don’t want to make vcd disappear, but detroyed: i have to use mbr and don’t want nothing else interfere)

thanks

I bought a 1TB MyBook Studio II (FW800) for use under Snow Leopard. Same problem – the firmware update doesn’t seem to be for this model. Very annoying that there is no direct fix for this model, as it’s a great drive in other respects.

However, I followed the instructions yakkoj suggested, using vifs to edit /etc/fstab, and it worked brilliantly. Just make sure you know how to insert, save and quit with vi…

Cheers,

James