My passport used in windows, once connected to MAC not recognized in windows anymore

jkattoor · August 25, 2010, 4:14am

Hi everybody,

I have a WD passport which i was using with my windows xp.

Once my friend took and connected it to a MAC.

After this, I am not able to read the contents on the passport.

The device is connected and is recognized by windows, but I am not able to see the contents of it.

pls help, if you have observed this issue?

jkattoor · August 25, 2010, 4:30am

When i see the device manager, disk management. I find that the disk shows as not initialized.

I also hear a small motor running sound when I first connect to the computer and then it stops.

Bill_S · August 26, 2010, 10:34pm

Did you reformat it for use on your Mac? If so, then Windows won’t recognize it, until you repartition and format it back to NTFS.

jkattoor · August 30, 2010, 11:21pm

I am not sure, but I am not able to format the USB. The comment says that format not possible.

bill_s wrote:

Did you reformat it for use on your Mac? If so, then Windows won’t recognize it, until you repartition and format it back to NTFS.

Bill_S · September 3, 2010, 4:50pm

jkattoor wrote:

Hi everybody,

I have a WD passport which i was using with my windows xp.

Once my friend took and connected it to a MAC.

After this, I am not able to read the contents on the passport.

The device is connected and is recognized by windows, but I am not able to see the contents of it.

pls help, if you have observed this issue?

I’m sorry, I see what happened. Windows and Macs are completely different platforms. Most likely, you had the drive formatted in NTFS, which is a Windows format. Newer Macs can read NTFS, but not write to them. PC’s and Mac’s do not play well together. So, it’s probable that when your friend connected the Passport to his Mac, he did something that caused the Passport’s partition to become corrupted. You can try to find a data recovery software that restores partitions to get your data back. Otherwise, and since you can see the drive in your Disk Management, you can delete the partition and repartiton and format the drive. You will lose the data on the drive if you do this, though.