About 2 years ago I purchased this 500Gb Acomdata drive that was on sale at Fry’s, it was a good deal back then, cost me about 100 bucks, it had an aluminium case and a power off switch, and I was in the need to expand the storage capacity of my multimedia server, which is linux based.
I didn’t researched this product, I didn’t even knew that acomdata was a brand, anyway I remember seeing the “Hybrid Drive” statement, but didn’t care, I was going to wipe this drive an reformat it as ext3, so I was aware that all the “software features” it had were useless to me, like the PushButton™ Backup and the Nomad Mobile Desktop.
After I arrived home, I plugged this thing on my server, which had ivman and a custom script to mount anything, but after few seconds nothing happened, I look at the kernel messages and I started to worry, It showed as a CD drive instead of a Mass Storage Device, I tried unsuccessfully to mount this manually, so I thought this drive must be bad.
The next day I connected this drive to a Windows XP, and after some drivers install, it was working, I noticed that it created a virtual CD drive on Windows it had some software on it, so I thought that this was some kind of partition that would be erased after I formatted the drive, so I did this, but the partition was still there.
I did some research on the internet but didn’t found anything useful, so I was again trying to make this stupid drive worked on linux, I hate when I have to fight with the stuff I buy just to make it work on linux, I was very annoyed by this, finally after looking the kernel messages I’ve found that the drive was acting as a SCSI device, so I activated “Probe all LUNs on each SCSI device” in the kernel and after a kernel restart both partitions were available on Linux, however this still had a problem, because I was using ivman to detect the drive and mounted, ivman didn’t worked for hard drive partition, just for the virtual CD, I’ve tried unsuccessfully to delete that stupid CD partition on windows and Linux.
I had enough of this and I was going to take this drive back to the store, but in a desperation moment I took my screwdriver and started to tearing apart the drive, I wasn’t even stopped by the warranty void seal, my intention was to take the drive format it and put it back without the cd part, I did this, and the format was successful, the drive was totally empty, but when I put this back to the enclosure the stupid CD partition was there, empty this time, but it was there, so it was a firmware issue and I didn’t found a firmware upgrade to remove this stupid feature.
I did some scripts to detect this unmounted the CD part and mount the hard drive partition, it took me about a week to have this thing working the way I wanted, this was unbelievable, why they don’t put the software to remove this “hybryd feature”.
However this drive has been working fine, with the virtual CD partition still there until Yesterday, I was in the need to transfer some large files from work to home, and this was the drive more reachable from all the drives I have, so I bring it to the office, and as soon as I plugged in the CD partition appeared on my Desktop, so I thought it has been a while now, lets see if I can finally reflash the firmware to remove this so called feature, and I’ve found a forum with several users trying to remove this, and suddenly I’ve found this post:
You need this software from http://www.mediafire.com/?bgwuwq5xzbm
unzip and click on MP251MFG, click on “configure hdd” and once it says pass just unplug and plug in the device. CD PART gone.
I quickly downloaded the file in question, it was a zip file called “REMOVE CD PART.zip” with about 1.5Mb in size, it has a Readme.pdf that describes the MP251MFG program, I booted up in Windows, installed the fsdriver because this drive was an ext3, plugged the drive and run the MP251MFG.exe application this is what I saw:
I didn’t backed up the drive, I was just exploring the options and I clicked the Configure HDD, a process was started and finished successfully, I was affraid that my data were gone, so I headed to check if the data was there, and it was, I copied the important stuff somewhere else, unplugged the drive and plugged back in, and voilà, the CD partition was gone along with the data in the drive, but that din’t matter the CD partition was really gone 
The drive was reformatted to FAT32, so I reformatted back to ext3, and now it is working pretty well, 2 years later.
I’ve found that this program works for other drives too, here are some links where this program can be found
For Windows:
- xSil251 Switch HDD to CD+HDD_Nomad Mobile Desktop_V1.04_091007
- xSil251 Switch CD+HDD to HDD 3.5_Toshiba_V1.02_041307
For Macintosh:
thank you! says:
You saved me headaches! thanks a bunch!
Great! says:
I’ve been looking for a solution to this issue for a long time! This should help me out a lot. Thanks so much!
eric says:
Awsome this was bothering me
V says:
THANK YOU! Those IDIOTS at tech support with ACOMDATA couldn’t solve this last year and I’ve been trying to find the solution for a couple years now. I blamed Windows7 for mishandling the USB connection but alas it was this firmware CD partition. All seems to work fine now. I’m on win7, ran the MP251 and just configured HDD…. didn’t touch anything else and it worked.
Joyce says:
I pressed the same button while exploring… Didn’t back up data before and lost everything…
Anyone any idea of getting data back?
Joolz says:
Fraid it didn’t work for me. It says device not found. Tried both the links above (Mac links) and got the same result on both. Also, these would not run in my Intel Mac, so I had to move the Acomdata drive to the G5.
That’s too bad, I share the same frustration with this useless additional CD volume that’s causing grief to so many. If I’m missing something here and someone can help, i’m all ears. Just want this stupid thing gone.
Thanks
Joolz says:
UPDATE
Finally had the stupid CD volume removed. Unfortunately I couldn’t use the Mac to do this, having to resort to a pc machine running xp. Please keep in mind that your data WILL BE LOST during this process, so save it first.
The instructions for this are crude so here’s a brief:
download and start with xSil251 Switch HDD to CD+HDD_Nomad Mobile Desktop_V1.04_091007
Plug in your drive and start the app Shd2cdhd.exe. It will ask for a password, I just used 1234 (this isn’t something that matters so use whatever on this one time deal only). Then proceed.
After that’s done start the app xSil251 Switch CD+HDD to HDD 3.5_Toshiba_V1.02_041307
and it just follow through with a couple of OK clicks. This last step removes the CD partition for good but it will format the drive as Fat 32, so you’ll likely want to format it once again in the Mac if you prefer to use a more Mac friendly format. In my case I plugged it back in the Mac, opened Disk Utility and formatted it. after all this done, I now have what appears to be normal single volume mounted on my desktop.
Why do this? There’s a practical reason for doing this. That CD Volume adds no benefit whatsoever to you. It just gets in the way and clutters your desktop. Also whenever you want to disconnect and remove the drive you now have to to eject both volumes (the actual Acomdata hard drive and the CD volume).
Acomdata is retarded for adding this “feature” that is useless, outdated and serves no purpose whatsoever. So removing it is safe and it will save you headaches down the road. Just do this before you add a lot of data to the drive as it will be completely erased during the process of removing the cd volume, as described above.
thanks a bunch to Ivan for taking the time to create this informative page for us. Much appreciated.
Marc says:
I have this exact same hdd..a 500gb…i have important files in it..i did’tn use it for months because it was on storage…when i plug it in it did not run the cd part wherein you need to enter your password. thinking maybe the hdd just froze..i took it apart and it was a WD caviar blue…I tried to hot wire it using IDE-SATA usb connection…the hd spins reads at the start but it does not show in my computer..i did the device manager thing and it showed an unrecognizable drive, tried to rename the path letter but could not…downloaded the wd data lifeguard and it started spinning and doing test…but still i cant access my files….please help??? does anyone have the old firmware for this(the one that shows the cd part)….PLEASE…
Ivan Villareal says:
I don’t think you need the old firmware to access your file, the firmware doesn’t touch the hdd, so maybe your ide-sata to usb is faulty?, why don’t you try plugging your drive to the internal sata port on your machine, or try a different sata cable, if none of the above works, try a forensic linux distro like helix, to see if you can get the files from whatever type of partition the disk has.
Marc says:
UPDATE:
After much research about Redemption Nomad…I found a solution in gearhack…I was able to access my hdd via TESTDISK http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk …and was able to recover my data…I think the problem was the security feature was a corrupted virtual drive(CD PART)..when the partition was corrupted it prevented me from accessing the data…so test disk was the solution, it scanned the hd and viola! I recovered it…TestDisk can even retrieve most data even if it was formatted…I the reformat the hdd so i can use it… here’s the link to gearhack forum regarding the problem.. http://www.gearhack.com/Forums/DisplayComments.php?file=Computer/AcomData_E5_HybridDrive_External_Hard_Drive_Disassembly
Hope this helps to those who were hijacked by Redemption Nomad from Acomdata…
cheers
Al says:
If you happen to have the AcomData E5 busted or obsolete drive which you know the drive is still good, you can use EASEUS Partitionn Recovery (Freeware) to find the lost partition by using deep scanning. After that, you should be able to read off the drive.