WD 1T stopped backing up says read only

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

Hi, I’m am not experinced with external hard drives, I have a WD 1T external hard drive around half full. I use it to back up my iMac.

It stopped working and a message comes up:

'Time machine could not complete the back up “My Book”.

Files cant be copied onto the back up disc because it appears to be read-only.

You may need to repair or reformat the disc using Disk Utility. If the disc cant be repaired, you must use a different disk for backups.’

So I went into disc utility but that brings up all sorts of options and this is where I get stuck as I dont know what any of them mean.

Any help would be very gratefully recieved - thank you

2

To partition and format the drive follow the steps on the following link:

How to partition and format a WD drive on Windows (8, 7, Vista, XP) and Mac OSX

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3865

Be aware that this will delete all data.

Make sure to backup all files if necessary.

3

This information is good if you have windows 8 as the drop down box works but all the other options don’t.

Once I knew there was no way of saving and reformating I moved all the back up files onto my computer then erased all the information on the disc, using disc utility to do that, in disc utility I then made a partition and renamed it then went into time machine preferances and clicked on the new name and started back up, it’s working well now.