New My Passport Drive - Read Only on MAC!

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

I have a WD My Passport 320GB external hard drive that I am trying to hook up to my iMac for the first time. I’m running Mac OS X 10.5.8. I’m extremely frustrated because this drive is in a read-only mode, and I can’t figure out how to change it! I can’t believe that WD makes it so difficult for users to hook up a silly hard drive.

I’ve been trying to read through some of these forums for help, but nothing has been helpful so far. Suggestions? Thanks!

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It shows as read-only because it comes preformatted for Windows.  To use it on a Mac you need to reformat it.  If you receive an error while doing it you must reboot the computer and retry.

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

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Thanks for the tip - but I tried that, and still nothing. After going through the process, it tells me that it “could not unmount the disk”. Any thoughts?

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Restart the PC and Reformat the drive

It couldn’t unmount the drive due to an open file on the drive

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Seeing as how I tried this restarting and retrying technique before and it didn’t work, I honestly wasn’t impressed with your answer. However, because the WD support team has failed to respond to my support case # (that was emailed) for over 2 days, I figured I’d give it another shot. It actually worked.

However, in the future, maybe you should link to the area of the website that tells you how to reformat and partition, because it took me a bit to find. Your instructions were not as helpful as they could have been if you would have done that. I’m decent with computers (which is why this was so frustrating!) but if you were responding to someone who really doesn’t have that techie ability, they would have been lost.

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My bad.

What you don’t know just ask since people will not assume that they need to show something unless necessary

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