I purchased a WD Cloud storage and have worked with it for many weeks. Just doesn’t work and I tried delete and reinstall. I thought I reformat the drive and use it as a regular external HD but the drive isn’t visible in the disk utilities. Mac Desktop used. Any suggestions before I throw this worthless HD in the trash?
Unless the drive is damaged (physically or bad sectors/blocks) it is not worthless and can be repartitioned and reformatted for use with almost any Mac or Windows computer. See the following guide that gives a general overview of how to partition and format the drive to work with a Mac.
How to partition and format a WD drive on Windows and Mac OSX : http://support.wdc.com/KnowledgeBase/answer.aspx?ID=3865
Yes and thank you for the link. But I know this already and the WD Cloud drive is not listed on the left side. Yes it’s on with blue light. That’s the problem is WD Drive is running and not listed to reformat. I’ve really had a difficult time with this drive. Maybe it’s just broke? Note the internal HD of the iMac is listed under WDC. I don’t want to accidentally erase the iMac HD.
By indicating it has a blue light, I assume you have not removed the hard drive from the WD My Cloud enclosure. If this is the case you won’t be able to do what you want to do, reformat the drive solely for your Mac.
The WD My Cloud enclosure is a network attached storage device. It is not an external USB drive. One cannot access the drive via a USB connection.
If you haven’t already done so it is recommended to read the WD My Cloud User Manual: http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/?id=439&type=25. It explains how to configure and use the network attached storage drive and its features.
My advice would be:
Dig out the ‘Quick Installation Guide’ leaflet that came with the drive.
Follow the instructions for ‘Mobile Devices’ (even if you’re using it with a desktop PC).
These instructions take you to a much more rational setup procedure, using the control interface (the ‘Dashboard’) built in to the device.
As Bennor says, you would also benefit by reading the User Manual first.
Read pages 1-11, as far as the heading ‘Getting Started Using the Online Setup Installer’, then skip to ‘Getting Started Without the Online Setup Installer’ on p21.
When you get to the end of Chapter 3, skip to Chapter 6 ‘At a Glance: The Dashboard’.
Only when you have your device basically installed and running as a NAS would I suggest reading up about using the various WD apps.
Note that these apps are entirely optional for local use; the backup and sync apps may better be replaced by generic, free apps, such as FreeFileSync.
Depending on your priorities, you should then read up on:
- backing up your devices to the NAS
- backing up the NAS to another storage device
- setting up and using Apple TimeMachine
- setting up and using the media server
- setting up and using remote access
