I just purchased a my book essential drive and have hooked it up to my macbook. When I click on the Time Machine screen that popped up on whether I want to use Time Machine for the backups I said yes. A screen then pops up and says I have to first erase the MYBook disk. Nothing has ever been backed up to the MyBook. It is brand new out of the box. Should I allow the disk to be erased? Is this normal for a new external hard drive?
Yes, you need to allow the Time Machine to erase the drive.
It actually re-format the drive with an Apple file system.
That way the Time Machine would be able to work with it.
FYI: after it formatted the drive with Apple file system, only Apple computer can see the drive.
Windows PC will not.
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I have a PC desktop running XP sp3. Is there any way to run backups on the My book essential for both my mac laptop and my pc desktop? We plan to replace our desktop with an IMac this spring but would like to have my documents and email from the pc backed up so I can transfer them to the IMAc without too much difficulty. I guess I could just copy the pc files to disk to transfer to the new Imac once we get it if it takes a lot to change the My Book essential to do both.
If you are planning to use the WD external drive to move data between PC and Mac.
Please do not allow Time machine to erase the drive.
Just use copy and paste so the WD external drive file system is still FAT32.
That way both PC and Mac will see the WD external drive and able to share data.
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I dont think my My Book Essential is formatted in the FAT 32 system. On the box it says it is formatted NTSF for Windows XP. I tried just connecting it to my macbook and dragging and dropping my I Tunes library to the My Book icon on my desktop but it says that I cannot move the file because the My Book cannot be modified. Does this mean i need to set up 2 partitions on the My Book to be able to put both pc files and macbook files on it?
it would be better to prepare a partition with following before using it as TM backup disk:
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In Disk Utility, make sure it has a GUID partition and is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
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Make sure “Ignore ownership on this volume” is not enabled. (see " Get Info" on hard disk icon).
read http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1427 for more info.
for GUID partition, read here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table
looks like it could be supported in vista or higher.
Thank you Koyeung for more input.
FYI: To use WD external drive for both Mac and PC, NOT Sharing.
It is safer and better to create two partitions, one GUID partition for Mac and NTFS for windows.
in reality GUID partition can not read or explore by windows Vista or Win7 machine even some said it might.
Just wanted to say thank you to the person who asked this question and thanarath who responded. This is my first external hard-drive and Mac. I had the same problem when first plugging in Passport essential to use with Time Machine. I couldn’t figure out what else to do to make it work so I clicked erase as suggested. Glad to know that was the right thing to do as I have been worrying about it ever since.
thanarath wrote:
Yes, you need to allow the Time Machine to erase the drive.
It actually re-format the drive with an Apple file system.
That way the Time Machine would be able to work with it.
FYI: after it formatted the drive with Apple file system, only Apple computer can see the drive.
Windows PC will not.
Do not partition these drives to work on both PC and MAC. I guarantee your data will get corrupted
