New to this whole thing Computer Illiterate

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

So a quick and I’m sure very easy question, I recently bought the My Book 1TB external hard drive, got home and plugged it into my Mac iBook I’m only interested in having a copy of my pictures and itunes for when I eventually upgrade to a newer Mac and I would also like to maybe back up a few things off of my PC as well. Nothing too fancy or technical.

I’ve read through the manual and it’s like an alien language to me about SmartWare and CD manager. Can I simply just drag the files (or copy and paste on my PC) into the window while exploring the WD? Do I need to worry about the SmartWare software or the Turbo stuff or can I just copy and paste the stuff I need into it and call it good. I’m worried because I’m copying files off of a very old Mac and want to be able to also copy and view these items on a much newer Mac and a new PC.  In addition when I click on the SmartWare icon it says:

Unreadable SmartWare Drive

There is no writable WD SmartWare partition available on this WD drive. This can occur if you are attempting to write to a WD drive formatted for a different operating system, or if the drive is locked.

Please make sure that this WD drive is formatted for the operating system you are currently working on, and that the drive is unlocked.

This gives me the feeling that this is going to be more of a headache than I previously thought. Any info would be greatly appreciated

2

Ok. First of all. This drive comes preformatted for Windows users NTFS. You will need to format it for HFS+ if you wish to use it with your Mac.

Second. If the drive is formatted for HFS (Mac), it won’t work on Windows. So, you will need to format the drive for FAT32 if you wish to use the unit between your Windows and Mac computer. And yes, you can transfer files manually to the drive using copy & paste or drag and drop.

If you wish to format the drive to fat32, you can find instructions in the WD Website:

http://support.wdc.com/  (I wish I could give you the exact link but the WD website is down)

and you can format the drive for fat32 using a Mac computer… Will give you more info as soon as the WD site is up and running.