July 2015 Solution for Multiple Problems with a New ‘My Passport for Mac’
(Note: I am posting this same message in response to several topics in this Forum, since the symptoms sounded similar to mine and I suspect WD software is causing them.)
Like many other Users here, I recently bought a new external WD drive. The irony here is that I already own 3 other WD external drives, and they have been running fine for several years on our two Mac computers for photo and backup uses. Not so with this new drive. Following the WD installation steps, I first installed their software WD Drive Utilities and WD Security. And then my confusion started, because I now got the message ‘Error in RAID configuration’, even though I don’t use RAID and had done nothing except plug in the new drive. I ran the WD Drive Utility, Status Check, and my laptop actually crashed! I also saw the new drive mount at first, then spontaneously dismount after a minute or so. I even dismounted the new disk, mounted one of my older disks I have used for several years, and now it reported ‘Error in RAID configuration’, something it had never done before, and when I ran the WD Drive Utility, Status Check, on my older Passport drive my laptop again crashed.
Like others here, I wasted a lot of time trying to resolve this, but let me skip all that and get right to what I did to get this new disk (and my old ones) to work correctly again.
Solution which worked for me: I uninstalled the WD Drive Utilities software (the entire folder) completely. So far I have not uninstalled the WD Security software, although I have not dared to use it yet and likely never will. To uninstall WD Drive utilities, I used the free app AppCleaner from freemacsoft.net (NOT the app in the Mac App store similarly named App Cleaner; it may work just as well, but I have never used it.) Now that the WD Drive Utility is off my computer, I can use the new WD Passport and all my older Passport drives. I have run Apple’s Disk Utility, Verify, numerous times on the new drive, and using Carbon Copy Cloner I have cloned up to 340 GB to the new Passport drive, followed by Verifying it, without errors or any of the symptoms listed above.
WD versions for me were: WD Drive Utilities 2.0.2.18, which folder contained WDDriveUtilityHelper 1.0.0.16. I hope this helps others on this Forum.
