Wd My Passport For Mac Will It Work On Pc

Does the drive have a letter assigned to it in Windows? You may have a corrupted file system on the drive.

If it has a letter, you can check by doing the following: If you are using Vista or higher, you will first need to open an elevated command prompt. From the Start Menu, under Accesories find Command Prompt and right click. Select Run As Adminstrator and accept the User Account Control prompt. If you are using XP you can just run the Command Prompt. When the command prompt appears, type CHKDSK driveletter: /F (replacing driveletter with your assigned letter).

Use a Windows PC to format the WD My Passport drive first to ExFAT then try again on the Mac. Use a Mac with an older release of Mac OS to format the drive. The My Passport for Mac is WD's newest release, and was designed to specifically serve Mac users with the same out-of-the-box functionality that the My Passport Ultra offers. It maintains compatibility with PC operating systems (which requires reformatting), and it is similar in functionality and performance to the seventh generation My.

It will check the file system and attempt to correct any errors. However, be aware depending on its condition you may still end up with corrupted files. Some times this corruption can occur when unplugging from your TV or not safely removing the device from your computer. If this is a portable drive (no separate power supply), then this may be a power issue.

Portable hard drives require a fair bit of power, and while they SHOULD fall within the USB specs (500mA for USB 2.0), some demand a little more. Equally, some hosts (computers, TVs etc) provide just a little below spec, so sometimes you get a bad combination. To test this theory, try the HD on a number of different USB ports on different computers (not just your PC & Mac) and see if they can be read on any of them. If this is indeed the problem, and none of the ports on your computers provide enough power, then there are two things you can do: 1) get a USB 'Y' cable which will aggregate the power from two different sockets or 2) use an external power supply if your HD has a socket for one (if it does not, you may be able to obtain another HD enclosure, which does have such a connection, and transfer the drive itself to it.

As of 2018, Western Digital offers no shortage of external drives for Mac computers – from the My Book Essential to the My Book Pro and the My Book Studio, nearly 30 WD drives play nicely with Apple’s macOS operating system, as does the My Passport Studio model. But with more than 262.5 million PCs shipped in 2017, according to data from Statista, there’s a good chance your Passport Studio will need to play nicely with a Windows computer, too. When it comes to cross-platform flexibility, you’ve got a few options for crossing the Mac and PC streams. About eFAT and FAT32 Here’s something your My Passport for Mac Quick Install Guide might not tell you: Hard drives usually come formatted in two different ways, one catering to Windows and one catering to Mac. NTFS-formatted drives work with Windows computers, and HFS+ drives work with Mac. However, by formatting your My Passport differently, you can ensure compatibility in a variety of different ways.

Hard drives formatted to exFAT or FAT32 can read and write data on both Mac and PC operating systems, though FAT32 is limited to a 4-gigabyte-per-file size limit. Formatting your drive will erase all its data, so be sure to back it up before making the change. External Drive for Mac to Windows 10 If you’ve got a WD external drive for Mac platforms and you want it to work on a Windows 10 PC, exFAT format is your best bet. To start formatting, connect your WD Passport to your Mac; then open “Mac HD” and click “Applications,” “Utilities” and “Disk Utility.” From the Disk Utility window, select the Passport hard drive. Here, you’ll usually see two listings of partitions available on the drive – select the listing that is furthest left. Click the Disk Utility’s “Erase” button; assign the drive a name in the “Name” field; then hit “Erase,” and click “Done” when the erasing process is complete. Now, click the “Partition” button at the top of the Disk Utility and click “Format.” Choose “exFAT” from the drop-down menu that appears and click “Apply” to format the drive, which will take a few minutes.