My passport for mac not detectable on windows 7 with EXFAT format

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

Hi guys, i hope someone here could help me with a problem that im facing

I recently bought a passport for mac and it came formatted as mac os extended journal

The hard drive’s behaviour is normal on my osx lion, however when i plugged the hard drive in when running windows 7 via boot camp, the OS reported that the device (hard drive) failed to install, and when i checked what seem to cause this issue, the OS mentioned a  WD SES USB DEVICE driver failed to install or some sort (sorry i cant remember the exact words)

So i figured that this might be caused by the fact that the hard drive is in a format thats not recognizable by windows 7, hence i decided to reformat the hard drive to EXFAT on my osx lion via disk utility

After reformatting, the hard drive’s behaviour on the osx lion once again was normal, time machine even detected it

So i tried to see if windows 7 would detect the hard drive with its new format, butt sadly the hard drive fails to even appear on My Computer, i tried troubleshooting the hard drive and managed to install the missing WD SES USB DEVICE driver, however, the hard drive still fails to appear on My Computer

I hope someone could help me :slight_smile: and sorry for the very long message, just wanted to inform what i did entirely to arrive at this situation.

2

Did you check if the passport is recognized on the disk management window? If it is, try to reformat it again on exFAT, but from the windows side. 

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3865/session/L3RpbWUvMTMzNTExMzY3MC9zaWQvbip5T1VoV2s%3D

3

hey man, thanks for the reply :slight_smile:

so i initialized the disk on disk management and partitioned the hard drive to exFAT but it still fails to appear on my computer

ive been looking through the community discussions and it seems that many people are experiencing this sort of problem

maybe i should try formatting it to NTFS and see if the format is causing the issue, but i doubt so, btw will the hard drive break if i reformat too many times?

4

Another alternative to use on Windows and Mac is to format NTFS for Windows. Then download NTFS-3G http://mac-free.com/download/NTFS-3G.html I don’t know anybody that has used EXFAT. 

Joe

5

hey guys, i really do appreciate the replies

however, my problem has been solved when i tried formatting the hard drive on windows 7 from exFAT to NTFS

windows 7 detected the hard drive on my computer and after i formatted again from NTFS to exFAT this time, windows 7 finally detected my hard drive with the exFAT format

thanks for the reply again :slight_smile: