Did you ever face no writable WD SmartWare partition found problem? This problem may make you unable to access your WD external hard drive and data. Fortunately, you can fix this problem through the solutions in this post.

About WD SmartWare No Writable Partition Found Error

You may be familiar with WD SmartWare if you own a Western Digital external hard drive. You may like to buy an external hard drive to back up your files because the internal hard drive space is limited.

Some WD external hard drives come with WD Smartware backup software. You can back up files without installing this software on Windows or Mac. You can disable its backup feature if you just need an ordinary external hard drive. Surely, you can also install WD Smartware on computer to activate its backup feature if your WD hard drive is not mounted with this software.

WD SmartWare is an application that enables you to automatically protect your data through continuous or scheduled backups. If your files on computer are corrupted or lost, you can recover them from WD external hard drive.

This application supports Windows Vista and 7/8/10 operating systems. Besides, it supports most types of WD hard drives except for new My Passport, new My Book, and 8TB My Book drives with 8 character serial numbers (these devices should use WD Backup software).

Many of you may use this piece of software to back up important files automatically and regularly into WD external hard drive to ensure data security. However, some users report that they have encountered no writable WD SmartWare partition found problem.

I have now purchased two WD external Hard drives and after a few months of using each of them I get the message “No writable WD SmartWare partition found”… — community.wd.com

no writable WD SmartWare partition found

This problem makes users unable to access their WD external hard drives and data. Some people may have stored many important and valuable files in WD external hard drive and the original files are corrupted unfortunately. If so, they may suffer huge losses.

Are you facing the same problem? If so, please read below to get solutions.

Fix No Writable WD SmartWare Partition Found Issue

If you can still find the original WD SmartWare partition in Disk Management, this is a piece of good news for you. That means you have possibility of repairing it well by using software instead of replacing hardware. Hardware repairing is more expensive and complicated than software repairing.

Here is the tutorial on how to check partition in Disk Management (take Windows 10 as example).

Step 1: Open Disk Management.

  • Press “Windows + R” keys simultaneously to call out Run
  • Enter “msc” in the Run box and press Enter key.

Step 2: Find the disk and partition to see whether there are problems.

Disk Management

Assign Drive Letter

Sometimes, WD no writable partition found problem may be just caused by the absence of drive letter. If a partition has no drive letter, it will not be displayed in WD SmartWare. Some users report that they have fixed this problem by assigning drive letter.

I was having this exact problem until just now… I went to the disk management section. The drive was there, but had no drive letter and was not “active.” So, I assigned a drive letter and made the drive active and everything worked.— community.wd.com

How to check the no writable partition found WD SmartWare problem is caused by the absence of drive letter? If you open Disk Management and you find the original WD external hard drive partition is blue without a capital letter, you can confirm it. Then, you can assign a new one to the partition to solve this problem.

Here is the tutorial.

Step 1: Open Disk Management.

Step 2: Right-click on the partition without drive letter and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths… option to call out a new window.

choose Change Drive Letter and Paths... option

Step 3: Click Add button on the new pop-up window to call out another new window.

Step 4: Keep the default options on the Add Drive Letter or Path window and click OK.

Add Drive Letter or Path window

A new drive letter will be automatically assigned to the partition after you click OK to save the changes. And then, you can launch WD Smartware to see whether the no writable WD SmartWare partition found problem is solved.

Create a New Partition or Recover Partition

Similarly, you can check in Disk Management whether there is a partition on your WD drive. The black unallocated space in Disk Management indicates no partition. If there is no partition on it and the WD drive doesn’t store any files, you can create a new partition to solve WD no writable partition found problem.

If so, you just need to open Disk Management and right-click on the unallocated space to choose New Simple Volume. Then, you can follow the wizard to complete partition creation. Please note the file system choice: NTFS or FAT32 file system for Windows and HFS+ file system for Mac.

But if you have used the WD drive to store important files and the partition is lost for unknown reason, you should try Partition Recovery feature of MiniTool Partition Wizard.

Here is the tutorial.

Step 1: Activate Partition Recovery feature.

  • Buy MiniTool Partition Wizard and launch it to get its main interface.
  • Click Partition Recovery on the toolbar.

click Partition Recovery on the toolbar

Step 2: Click Next and choose the WD disk for partition recovery and click Next again.

select a disk for partition recovery and click Next again

Step 3: Set the scanning range and click Next.

Tip: You can choose Unallocated Space because the partition was just lost and you don’t create a new one on the disk to overlap it.

set the scanning range and click Next

Step 4: Set scanning method and click Next.

Tip: You can select Quick Scan mode because the partition was just lost and it is not overwritten.

set scanning method and click Next

Step 5: Choose the lost partitions and click Finish.

choose the lost partitions and click Finish

Step 6: Click Apply button to execute the pending operations.

click Apply button

Step 7: Assign drive letter to the new partition with Disk Management or with the Change Letter feature of MiniTool Partition Wizard.

With the help of partition recovery, you can get the partition and data back at the same time. Then, you can launch WD SmartWare to see whether you can use the WD SmartWare partition and data on it as usual. If you can’t recover the data you want, you can try Data Recovery feature for deep file recovery.

Tip: If the WD external hard drive has no partition and is not initialized, you can just initialize the disk and create a new partition on it if this is a brand new disk. But if the WD external hard drive stores data, you should also use Data Recovery feature of MiniTool Partition Wizard to recover files before you initialize the disk.

Reformat Partition

If there is a partition on the WD drive but no writable partition found WD SmartWare problem still happens, you should try reformatting it.

Tip: No writable WD SmartWare partition found problem may be caused by corrupted partition table or file system because they are easy to be damaged if you often unplug WD drive in an improper way. You can try Check File System feature and Fdisk to repair them. Surely, you can also repair these problems easily just by reformatting.

Besides, WD SmartWare supports NTFS and FAT32 file systems for Windows and HFS+ file system for Mac. If you have switched between Windows and Mac, no writable WD SmartWare partition found problem will also happen. Then, you still need to reformat the partition.

But before you reformat it, please recover important files in advance.

Here is the tutorial.

Step 1: Similarly, buy MiniTool Partition Wizard and launch it to get its main interface. Then, click Data Recovery on the toolbar.

launch MiniTool Partition Wizard and click Data Recovery on the toolbar

Step 2: Select the WD partition and click Scan.

Tip: To retrieve data quickly, you can click Settings to limit the file types of scanning data and partition’s file system types if you know the file system and file types of the lost files.

select a partition or a hard disk containing lost files and click Scan

The following picture is the Settings interface.

Settings interface of data recovery

Step 3: Use tools to find out the lost files after the scanning process is completed.

  • Path: In this tab, files are displayed according to their paths. If there were many partitions on the WD drive, you can see Show More Partitions button which enables you to load more partitions when you can’t find the files in partitions on the list.
  • Type: In this tab, all of the files are displayed according to file types.
  • Show Lost Files: In this tab, only the lost files are displayed.
  • Find: This tool allows you to find out the files or folders easily by typing continuous part of their file names.
  • Filter: You can use this tool to narrow down the file range through filename/extension, file size, creation/modification date, deleted files, lost files, and normal files. Thus you can find out them quickly.
  • Preview: You can use this tool to preview the files that don’t exceed 100 MB before the data is saved. Besides, it can support 70 file types.

use tools to find out the lost files

Step 4: Check the files and click Save to recover them to safe position.

Then, you can reformat the partition to solve the no writable WD SmartWare partition found problem. This feature is free.

Here is the tutorial.

Step 1: Right-click the partition on WD drive and choose Format in the main interface of MiniTool Partition Wizard.

activate Format feature

Step 2: Choose a correct file system and click OK on the pop-up window.

choose a file system

Step 3: Click Apply button to carry out the pending operations.

Surely, you can also format the partition in Disk Management. Please refer to the following tutorial.

Step 1: Open Disk Management.

Step 2: Right-click on the WD drive partition and click Format… from the context menu.

Step 3: Choose a proper file system and keep other parameters as default. Then, click OK button to start reformatting process.

choose file system and click OK

Step 4: Click OK on the pop-up format warning window.

The reformatting method can radically solve the no writable WD SmartWare partition found problem caused by logical error. But if this method can’t solve the problem, you should check whether the drive is locked or failed.

Here are full solutions to no writable WD SmartWare partition found problem without data loss. You can adopt one of them according to your condition. I think it’s helpful to you.Click to Tweet

Bottom Line

Do you solve your problem with the above solution? Are there other situations this article doesn’t mention? We need your feedback and advice. Please make a comment below for sharing. Surely, if you have better solutions, please leave a comment, too.

Finally, if you have any problems in recovering data or carrying out the above methods, please leave a comment or email to [email protected] for help. We will reply you as soon as possible.

  • linkedin
  • reddit

About The Author

Linda
Linda

Position: Columnist

Linda has been working as an editor at MiniTool for 5 years. She is always curious about computer knowledge and learns it crazily. Her articles are simple and easy to understand. Even people who do not understand computer can gain something. By the way, her special focuses are disk management, data recovery and PDF editing.