When I bought the drive, I was surprised to see that it didn’t support OS X out of the box. Yes, it had some software specifically made for OS X on it, but even that didn’t help. Turns out, it just wasn’t in the right format. These hard drives are customized to run well on Windows (as you’d expect), and they don’t run well with OS X.
So to get it running, what we’ll need to do is format it in Journaled format, which is OS X only format or MS-DOS (FAT), which means it will run with both OS X and Windows. If you’re only going to be using the hard drive on a Mac, I recommend you stick with Journaled. Why You Need to Re-Format the External Hard Drive When I first got the hard drive, I wasn’t able to copy anything over to it (but I was able to copy from it). Disk Utility showed that it was formatted to MS-DOS (FAT) but I’m pretty sure it would have been NTFS instead. If you experience the same issue, your only recourse is to reformat it in one of two formats.
How To Wipe Clean Our Wd My Passport For Macbook Pro
Much like my WD My Passport Ultra, most external hard drives out there are customized to work with Windows, not OS X. If you’re only going to use the external hard drive with Macs or you want to use it for Time Machine backups, format it in Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
If you’re like me who also needs to use at least a part of the hard drive from Windows PCs, you’ll need to choose MS-DOS (FAT) format. But here you won’t get great support for Time Machine. Plus you can’t make partitions bigger than 2 TB or move files larger than 4 GB around. How to Re-Format the External Hard Drive First, connect the external hard drive, bring up Spotlight Search by using the keyboard shortcut Cmd + Space and type in Disk Utility. Press Enter and Disk Utility will launch.
You can also find it in Utilities folder in Applications. Now, from the left column select 1 TB WD My Passport (or whatever your hard drive name is), and click on the Erase tab. From here, in Format, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled), give it a name if you want, and click Erase. You’ll get a warning. Again, click Erase. In a couple of seconds, you’ll have an OS X ready hard drive to go. Related: Check out our.
How to Create Partitions I’m planning on using my hard drive for both Time Machine backups and to carry media files around. I might need to use the hard drive with Windows computers so I’m going to format one of the partitions as MS-DOS (FAT), fully aware of its limitations.
The other one, for Time Machine backups, will be in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format. To create a partition, select the hard drive from the left column and click the Partition tab. From the drop-down below Partition Layout, select the number of partitions you want. Don’t go overboard here.
Now, just below, you’ll see a visual representation of the partitions. You can use the breakpoint to change the size of the partitions by moving it up or down.
You can also click on a partition, give it a name and select the format. Once you’ve decided all the details, simply click the Apply button. From the pop-up, select Partition. Disk Utility: Check out. What Do You Use It For? What are you planning on doing with the external hard drive? Or just storing media?
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'Hello, I have a WD My Passport hard drive and I had many photographs on it. Today I connected it with my computer, but I found nothing inside. The photos are really vital to me. I’m very eager to recover data from a WD My Passport hard drive. What can I do?
Best Regards' You can easily store a variety of files like documents and photos on a WD My Passport hard drive. However, they can be lost due to your mistaken deletion, formatted hard drive or even system errors and you would feel hard pressed to recover data from WD My Passport hard drive. Fortunately, you can still accomplish WD My Passport data recovery with qualified and secure. Read on and get to know the best way of WD hard drive recovery.
Some WD My Passport problems and simple solutions will also be listed to help you further protect the Western Digital external hard drive. Part 1.
The Best Western Digital Hard Drive Recovery Software is a reliable and effective WD hard drive recovery tool. It can help you retrieve different types of files from WD My Passport hard drive or any other device.
It supports any data loss scenarios, like deleted files recovery, formatted disk recovery, deleted/lost partition recovery, and virus attack. Also, Recoverit for Windows supports to create WinPE bootable media to help you recover data from crashed computer. So when your data gets lost from WD My Passport, calm down and resort to Recoverit WD Data Recovery. No matter how the data disappears, Recoverit can make it possible and easy to retrieve files from WD Passport in no time. Select a data recovery mode. To recover data from WD My Passport hard drive, you should select the 'External Devices Recovery' mode.
Connect WD My Passport. You should make sure the WD My Passport hard drive has been properly connected to and detected by your computer. Select the WD hard drive. Please select the WD My Passport HD where you deleted or lost your files, and click 'Start' to scan and search your files. Scan Your WD My Passport hard drive. It will start a quick scan to search lost files from WD hard drive.
You can simply preview some recoverable files after the scan. Deep Scan the WD My Passport HD. If you cannot find your files after the first scan, you can try the 'All-Around Recovery' mode which deeply scans and searches more files from your hard drive. Recover files from WD hard drive Finally, you can preview some recoverable files, filter the ones you want, and click 'Recover' button to get your data back. Notes: To make the recovery successful, please do not save the recovered files back to your WD My Passport again. WD My Passport Problems & Easy Solutions Nowadays WD My Passport hard drives are more and more popular because of its portable feature.
Nevertheless, it can't be denied that we might meet with some WD My Passport problems when we frequently use it to store and back up data. The problems may partly include:. WD My Passport is not detected or recognized.
WD My Passport does not show up on PC or Mac. The WD external hard drive does not spin up. Clicking noises from WD My Passport hard drive. The WD drive can't be accessed with the power LED on.
Files are hidden while the WD drive can be detected. Now that we have known some problems with WD My Passport hard drive, the next questions may be what causes the problems and how to fix them. Simple solutions. Change a new and suitable power cable. Connect WD My Passport to another USB or FireWire port.
Connect the WD external hard drive to a healthy computer. Do not connect the drive through a USB hub. Check if the hard drive shows up on Disk Management.
When you can not access WD My Passport hard drive and the data on it, do not fall into despair or spare no effort to search for data recovery services. These simple solutions can help you solve the WD My Passport problems more effortlessly and efficiently. By the way, what if data stored on the WD My Passport hard drive gets lost?
Recoverit Data Recovery is your reliable friend. No matter what causes the data loss, you can always resort to this WD data recovery software to get your lost or deleted files back.
More Solutions to WD My Passport Problems: What if a hard drive fails? We provide the hard drive failure solution for you:. If your computer hard drive is not detected, solve it by means of the post:. Wanna retrieve files from an undetected hard drive? This page may help you out:. Wonder how to fix 'WD external hard drive not recognized' error? Please refer to this article:.
Conclusion It must be a great pain to lose important pictures and files from WD My Passport hard drive. But thanks to WD data recovery software like Recoverit Data Recovery, it is easy to recover data from any storage devices. Exactly follow the simple steps mentioned above and you are able to recover data from WD My Passport in less than no time.