My Passport for Mac USB 3.0

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

I have two questions:

Can these drives be used, if a clone of the hard drive is stored on them, to boot a MacBook Pro with Mountain Lion?

When will these drives be available at retailers?

Thanks.

2

It should be possible, check the link below. Don’t know when they will be available but just in case you can also use a Windows USB 3.0 hard drive and it should work once you format it for Mac.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1167857/how_to_make_a_bootable_mountain_lion_install_drive.html

3

Hi Alucardx23,

Actually, I asked the question because Western Digital itself has published of list of drives that can and can’t be used:  http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1787/~/list-of-mac-bootable-wd-external-drives-and-how-to-format-them-to-install-on

Note the status My Passport drives. Hence my question about the new My Passport USB 3.0 drives.

I’m aware of the MacWorld article. In my case, I’m interested in using Carbon Copy Cloner to copy my internal hard drive to an external drive and need to know that the external drive can be used to boot via USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports.

Cheers

4

That list was last updated on 09/19/2011 so that could be a problem BC the My Passport USB 3.0 came out this year :smiley:. On this one I would contact tech support just to be sure. 

http://support.wdc.com/contact/contact.asp?lang=en

5

I was hoping that someone from WD is monitoring this forum and could respond. Anyway, I’ve now sent an email to support and received a response saying that they try to reply within one business day.

This question is unfortunately not addressed in the My Passport for Mac USB 3.0 spec sheet.

6

I have received the following reply from Western Digital. While I appreciate their quick response, I am rather surprised that they haven’t tested it for bootability and apparenlty have no intention of doing so. I guess I’ll be buying someone else’s external drives: [Deleted]

7

Jube104, who deleted Western Digital’s level 1 reply to my question, advises that the issue has now been sent to level 2.

Jube104 says that the reply was deleted because it contained the name of a Western Digital employee. It isn’t exactly clear why that led to deletion of WD’s entire reply rather than just the employee name, but let’s see what happens at level 2.

I would like to think that Western Digital, given that it is billing this product as designed for Apple computers, will determine whether it  can or can not be used to boot a Mountain Lion computer (with of course a copy of the internal hard drive on it from, for example, Carbon Copy Cloner) via USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports.

8

Update…

Shortly after this issue was referred to Level 2, I received a message saying that the issue has been sent to WD engineers for investigation and testing.

Good to see that WD is addressing the question. Now awaiting the response, which I’m sure will come as soon as their testing is complete.