My Book Essential WD (Western Digital) external drive on Linux

[Deleted member 155466]

I have a 2 TB My Book Essential WD (Western Digital) external drive (as new) I bought it many years ago for Windows and now I would like to use it with LInux. I tried several times to use it with LInux but it doesn't work, I had formatted it as fat 32 and then EXT4 and I wanted to install a Linux operating system making it bootable but without success.
In your opinion this external drive can be compatible with Linux?
Please can anyone give me some suggestions?

 

[theLegionWithin]

when the mybook is connected to the computer run lsusb to get the hardware id (displayed as xxxx:yyyy) and then run it through linux-hardware.org to see if it's compatible.

 

[Deleted member 155466]

Thank you very much.
This is the output:
$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 058f:6362 Alcor Micro Corp. Flash Card Reader/Writer
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 003: ID 1058:1140 Western Digital Technologies, Inc. My Book Essential (WDBACW)
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 007 Device 002: ID 046d:c30f Logitech, Inc. Logicool HID-Compliant Keyboard (106 key)
Bus 007 Device 003: ID 046d:c05a Logitech, Inc. M90/M100 Optical Mouse
Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub

(In the attachment what linux-hardware.org result (where there is "Western Digital My Book Essential", on the orange exclamation mark is write: This device model is known to have problems)

 

[KGIII]

We get this question now and then, though not often. The problem is that there's WD specific software on the top of things.

So...

This device doesn't work with Linux. You can open it up, remove the drive(s), and put them into an enclosure and then they'll work like regular drives.

 

[Deleted member 155466]

This device doesn't work with Linux. You can open it up, remove the drive(s), and put them into an enclosure and then they'll work like regular drives.

Sorry but I didn't understand well, please can you explain to me in more detail what I should do? Thank you

 

[KGIII]

Sorry but I didn't understand well, please can you explain to me in more detail what I should do? Thank you

WD's "Book" devices require special software that's only available for Windows. (I've never heard of anyone having success with WINE or Bottles but you can try.) The software handles the encryption function, as well as other functions. They've never made it work for Windows.

Inside the device's plastic shell is just a control board and a regular HDD. You can use that drive if you want but you have to remove it from the WD's hardware first. So, you can take it out and put it into an external drive enclosure if you're up to it and care enough to do so.

 

[dos2unix]

I have installed Linux on mine. I just create one big GPT partition table on the whole disk.
I don't create any partitions, and I don't format any partitions. The installer does all of that.

I have also done this on my WD passport drive as well.

 

[MikeRocor]

WD's "Book" devices require special software that's only available for Windows.

This is good to know.

I've never been a fan of WD hard drives, preferring Seagate, but WD are usually just a tiny bit cheaper so I might at some point have been tempted. Now that's less likely.

 

[KGIII]

I have installed Linux on mine. I just create one big GPT partition table on the whole disk.
I don't create any partitions, and I don't format any partitions. The installer does all of that.

I have also done this on my WD passport drive as well.

Can you elaborate? Was that without stripping the drive out and still using WD's software?

Last I knew, that was impossible but I'd love to be out of date because all sorts of people bought these.

 

[wizardfromoz]

...but I'd love to be out of date because all sorts of people bought these.

I can only speak from my experience, similar to Ray's, perhaps.

I bought a WD MyBook 4TB external, USB 3.0 connected, mains-powered drive around 2019 or so.

It currently houses 26 Linux distros, and several hundreds of GB of Timeshift snapshots from the other 2 drives in my rig.

I don't recall having disabled software, but can't be 100% certain. I just remember setting it to EXT4 and GPT and then it was Bob's your uncle.

I still have 1.4 TB available on it.

Cheers

Wiz

 

[dos2unix]

 

[dos2unix]

I have to say, I remember why I don't normally do this. It's a ssd, yes, but it's going thru a usb 3.1 connection.
It's bearable, but it's not a PCIE gen5 nvme connection.

 

[Fanboi]

You can open it up, remove the drive(s), and put them into an enclosure and then they'll work like regular drives.

^ Best option...

At one point external 3.5" drives (I don't really use the 2.5" externals much, they're bad ROI), were sometimes cheaper here than just the drive. I'd buy 'em, strip 'em, then put my older drives into some cases and sell them "used". Irony is I could resell them higher than without the case so double win. Did this each storage level up. Though next one I'll be buying just the drive, that era is now passed. I've got my eye on a 16TB next time I get a decent commission.

You'd probably get better performance via SATA <--> HDD than USB <--> SATA <--> HDD and it'd be safer in you chassis than on your desk where coffee and water dwell.

...Unless you're going portability?

 

[dos2unix]

Last I knew, that was impossible but I'd love to be out of date because all sorts of people bought these.

You are sort of right. There is software on the drive. I don't know why. I can use the drive in Windows without that software.
Maybe it's better or faster, but I don't use it. When that software is on the drive, it wants to boot into windows no matter what, it seems to bypass my UEFI boot options. But if you create a new partition table for the whole disk, and blow away that stuff, it works fine.

but you have to remove it from the WD's hardware first.

This remains the best option for me, I haven't done it to the passport drives, but I have done it for other drives.

The nice things about this device is that it works with both m.2 type and SSD drives. You can plug an NVME drive in, but it doesn't support full duplex). It does support USB 3.2 20GB. The latency is not noticeable at all.

 

[KGIII]

Huh... Thanks to both of you. I wonder if something has changed...

Are those the WD devices with the built in encryption? The kind where you have to enter a code to unlock them?

 

[dos2unix]

Are those the WD devices with the built in encryption? The kind where you have to enter a code to unlock them?

Hmmm.. these are 3 or 4 years old. I don't remember anything like that.

 

[KGIII]

Hmmm.. these are 3 or 4 years old. I don't remember anything like that.

Ah, that might be the difference. They come with or without automatic encryption options (AES 265).

I did not know that they came without that feature. (You can look up 'WD Essential encryption' and it's also an option with their Passport models.

I had no idea that you could get them without the encryption feature, but Google says that's an option.
We've had this come up a couple of times since I've been here. There was another post not too long ago. For them, the drive doesn't show up at all, not even in GNOME Disks - though I think there was an entry in lsusb but no amount of trying would get the drive to show up or mount.

In their case, it was the encrypted model - I'm pretty sure.

In the past, this was done with hardware. There was a controller board inside the drive enclosure. I'm not sure if that's the case today as you didn't indicate seeing one.

I'm not sure what they still offer, but I found this link:

https://www.westerndigital.com/products/portable-drives/wd-my-passport-usb-3-0-hdd?sku=WDBYVG0010BBK-WESN

That one mentions the encryption but I didn't dig deeper into it. From the Google search, it looks like they have varied models, with and without encryption - or they did. They've made some recent changes to their business, including setting one division as a new company entirely.

 

[bob466]

Not something I've ever wanted to do.

 

[Deleted member 155466]

I can only speak from my experience, similar to Ray's, perhaps.

I bought a WD MyBook 4TB external, USB 3.0 connected, mains-powered drive around 2019 or so.

It currently houses 26 Linux distros, and several hundreds of GB of Timeshift snapshots from the other 2 drives in my rig.

I don't recall having disabled software, but can't be 100% certain. I just remember setting it to EXT4 and GPT and then it was Bob's your uncle.

I still have 1.4 TB available on it.

Cheers

Wiz

Please how did you format it, because I screwed up my WD external memory (I formatted it as btrfs and tried to install Linux Mint) I can't do anything anymore, 1) I can't change the permissions 2) I can't reformat it anymore. What do you think I can do? (I seriously thought of throwing it in the trash under my house)
What do you think about this tutorial?
https://www.animmouse.com/p/how-to-install-linux-mint-on-btrfs/

P.S.
I have the BIOS on my computer so I didn't create the EFI partition for computers with UEFI as described in the tutorial. Is this correct?

 

[dos2unix]

I have the BIOS on my computer so I didn't create the EFI partition for computers with UEFI as described in the tutorial. Is this correct?

What size is the drive? Legacy BIOS doesn't (usually) recognize anything larger than 2TB.

sudo fdisk /dev/sdX
o
w

That will put a dos/mbr partition table on the drive. Replace the X with whatever letter your drive is.

sudo fdisk /dev/sdX
n
p
Which partition: [enter] for partition 1
First Sector: [enter] for 2048 (first sector)
Last Sector: +1900M
Do you want to remove btrfs signature?: Y
w

That will create a 1.9TB partition

You can do this with gparted as well.
Size in MiB = 1905796

If it's one partition, don't go larger than that.
If it's two or more partitions, make sure the total isn't larger than that.

If you're trying to do this from Windows, it's harder, There is a tool called diskinternals research for Linux filesystems
that has helped me in the past. It recognizes ext4 and xfs, I don't know about btrfs.