My passport essential

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

hi

got a my passport essential can view files on my mac but when plugged into windows 7 packard bell netbook i press on the external hard drive in devices and properties comes up and i cant view the files on the disc… need to be able to view on both for my work… please help ,thanks  

2

If the drive came formatted for Mac Windows will not read it. If it came formatted for Windows something is probably corrupt. You have 2 choices to make drive useable on both Windows and Mac. One is format it FAT32 but the max file size that will accept is 4 Gig. The other is format the drive for Windows NTFS then install NTFS-3G http://mac-free.com/download/NTFS-3G.html on the Mac. NTFS is the standard Windows format and is read only on a Mac. The utility should make the drive usable on both.

Joe

3

how do i format  Windows NTFS ? where do i find that as well? im on windows 7

4

This should explain things http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=3865 Reformatting will delete all the data on it now so make sure it’s backedup.

Joe

5

thanks will try that… will the partition say my passport? cos thats what the hard drive is called… in the article it said about initiating the drive, willl i have to do that? 

6

You shouldn’t have to inatilize it now. Delete the old partition/volume then select create new simple volume.and follow the guide.

Joe

7

theres a few system reserved healthy (system active, primary partiitiion), oackard bell c- healthy, boot page file, crash dump, primary and 3 with no name on volume just simple basic- one is recovery, the other efi system partition and healthy primary partition …which is the external hard drive?

8

think might have got it working… thing i downloaded for my mac was only a free trial though… so do you know the code to register it?