Moral: The next time I buy an external drive, the first thing I will do is reformat it to remove any and all 'value-added' software. I just have no faith that they would know what to do after the first thing they told me to do didn't work, and, yes, at this point I'm in an awful never-never land where my attempts at manual deletion mean that at this point you might not even expect the uninstaller to work. I have the feeling that perhaps there's some way-too-clever stuff on the WD drive itself that executes when the drive mounts and reinstalls Smartware or something of the sort.

What I'm really worried about is that I've deleted SmartWare a few times and it always comes back. it's the one that's supposed to be there to boot from if an update goes wrong. The scary/ironic part is that the WD drive is the one with the partition on which I keep a bootable backup copy of the OS, i.e. You may be sure I will physically disconnect all external drives before updating. The WD drive seems to work and DiskUtility finds nothing wrong with it. I don't think this is a Western Digital, I think it might be something to do with amework. There is one process running whose name begins with wd, 'wdhelper'. When I restart, there is no SmartWare icon in the menu. Since the WD drive has both FireWire (IEEE 1394) and USB interfaces, I guess one could try just deleting, say, the USB files and seeing whether the drive now works only with FireWire, but-well, personally I am not touching ANYTHING in THAT directory.įrom LaunchDaemons I deleted the entire WD Smartware directory from Application Support and I deleted WD Smartware.App itself.

I'm thinking they might needed to have the drive work as a drive. A way to find out would be to see whether they exist on a recent-ish Mac OS X system that has never had a external Western Digital drive installed. Kenny, my GUESS would be that these files are actually part of Mac OS X itself.

Reformat wd passport