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Deborah, if you plan to use drive for Quicken Backup only, the drive needs no special formatting. It’s data can go on any drive. What is important is if you are using a PC you use a PC formatted drive, but if you are using a Mac you should use a pre-formatted for Mac drive, it will make your life easier. WD sells both types. If you have not yet embarked on this project, consider this: The price of hard drives has really come down since you got the one you have. You can get a new one with twice the capacity at around half the price today. For a PC, you can find a nice portable drive of 1TB capacity on sale for around $60-70.
Nov 5, 2018 - WD external hard drive cannot be recognized with the light on in PC? Todo Backup for MacBuyTry. WD external hard drive and get all the lost data back right now. Don't format your drive and follow these steps to solve your problem. Here, you have two options to try to make the WD external hard. Do not try to reformat the drive on the mac. Plug in the passport while the windows 8 computer is on. Explorer will not recognize it until it is formatted in the windows format, but Disk Management should see it.
A Mac HD version will cost more, because manufacturers know Mac users are used to paying more for computer stuff (seriously!). Also, you likely do not need to erase everything on your current HD to make room for the Quicken backup. You likely need to remove a few gigabytes of data to make room for Quicken data so you can use your present drive without a massive erasing procedure. Hi there, JoeySmyth, just wanted to let you know that I first tried to delete the data that was on the WD My Passport.
It was very stubborn and I resorted to formatting the drive. I set it up for my Quicken backups and so far have had no problems. I was using a 7.5 GB thumb drive for the backups and it was full(!). I keep tax return copies and the Quicken backups because I’m such a nervous Nellie I was using the 200 GB Passport for all other backups until I bought a 3 TB My Book because now I have so much stuff! I want to thank you and Mike27Oct, for answering my questions and making me feel welcome to the forum.
Good for you, Deb. (You can just call me Mike; the second part of my username is my b-day as you may have guessed – it’s to differentiate me from all the other Mike’s in the world! And there are a variety of reasons a drive can be stubborn to allow deletion of certain files and folders, many of which would just likely bore you anyway to hear about them. Glad we made you feel welcome here. Being nice goes a long way. Joey and I are regulars here, and we usually get things more right than wrong, although Joey does like to jab me with a “gotcha” once in a while if I got it wrong.
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I recently purchased a 500gb Western Digital My Passport Elite external hard drive for my MacBook Pro. Since I run both Windows and Mac OS Version 10.4.11 on my MBP I wanted the drive to be readable and writable for both operating systems. When I connected the drive for the first time in the Mac OS it was recognized in the Finder but was not writable. So I followed the advice of a few forums and opened the Disk Utility and reformatted the drive for 'Mac OS Extended (Journaled)'. Things appeared to run smoothly, and I even copied about 10gb from my old external onto the My Passport.
I did not use the drive until a few days later when I connected again running in Mac OS, but this time an error message popped up: 'The disk you inserted was not able to be read by this computer.' The drive did not appear in My Computer when I switched to Windows. Switching back to Mac OS and opening the Disk Utility I figured I may as well try again to reformat the drive again, this time receiving the error: 'Disk Erase failed with the error: Input/output error'. I tried formatting with each volume format from the drop-down and got the same error. I then tried partitioning the drive (with 1 partition) and clicking on 'GUID Partition Table' in the Opitions dialogue box and received this error: 'Partition failed with the error: Input/output error.'
It should also be noted that when I first connect the drive it makes about 6 clicking sounds as it is trying to boot and then sounds like it turns off when the 'The disk you inserted was not able to be read by this computer' comes up. Which is really strange.
The drive comes up as '2.0 TB WD My Passport' in the Disk Utility. I don't understand why this is as it is a 500gb drive. I do remember seeing it as a 500gb drive when I opened the Disk Utility the first time I successfully reformatted the drive. What is going on!? Any help would be greatly appreciated.