Hiding the WD Smartware virtual CD on a Mac

Posted byAndrew

I really like Western Digital MyBook Essential drives. They’re inexpensive, they last (my 1TB drive is four or five years old, and survived moving between continents), and they’re reasonably quick. They have one drawback: a virtual CD they mount constantly. I’ve hidden the VCD on one of my drives using the WD software, but the other one keeps coming back. You can follow the process I gave for hiding partitions to hide this VCD:

  • First, run diskutil list | grep SmartWare to get your device identifier
  • Second, get your UUID following the process in the other post
  • Lastly, using vifs, add a line to your fstab that looks like this: UUID=9B5B83B0-58E6-3EC1-8472-4B300F6853E5 none hfs ro,noauto (replacing my UUID with your own)