My wd passport for mac only works as read files

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

Hi,

I just bought a 4TB wd passport for mac. When i bought i transferred some of my files to it from an macbook and it was working perfect! Then I went to work on a project and some of my coworkers used it to save files in it from a pc laptop. I though it wouldn’t work but it did. The problem is now. All the files are read only, I can’t save them or transfer them in any computer and it also doesn’t allow me to save anything in the disc.

2

Sounds like one of your coworkers might have reformatted the drive as NTFS.

A Passport for MAC might have been formatted in two options out of the box.

If the drive had been formatted HFS+ initially, that won’t work at all on any PC, requiring the PC user to reformat it to a supported type.
If the drive had been formatted ExFAT, that file system works on both PCs and MACs equally.

If the drive is now NTFS, Mac’s default support for NTFS is READ ONLY.

So you’ll either need to install NTFS drivers on your MAC, or reformat it back to ExFAT or HFS depending on your needs.

3

I Asked my colleague and he said he didn’t do anything. Anyway, now it doesn’t even show the files in my mac only empty folders. Is it damaged?

4

do you know where I could get a free install for ntfs`?