I can see from the multitude of forum queries across the internet that Western Digital’s “Smartware” is not a popular feature.

And removing it is just about impossible. Even if you format (erase) your entire drive. We’ve all tried it, haven’t we?

Then when Mavericks came out for Mac, there was a little problem:  Some people were experiencing an entire loss of their drive contents.

Western Digital promised a fix.

Fortunately I didn’t seem to be having the problem.

Until one day weeks after the problem was first announced I went into my time machine and NOTHING WAS THERE.  Totally blank. Zero. Nada.

Luckily all my video was backed up on other drives and all I lost was a back up of my computer applications, documents, downloads, photos, music and so forth.

A few days later Western Digital came out with the fix.

Well, it didn’t work for me. And after a few more hours added on top of the dozen or so previous hours searching the internet for solutions on this I very nearly gave up.

But I’m a clever guy.

I figured out a work-around that works every time. Well, I only tried it once, but I’m pretty sure it’s fail safe.

I was going to do a nice little intro on camera, but I ran out of play time, so what the heck–let’s cut to the chase!