WD External discs

WD External Drives My Passport Wireless
1

I have two external discs used for backing up my PC. The PC itself has died and is long gone, I connected the discs one by one to my iMac but unfortunately they would not open. I also have an Acer laptop which, when I connect, gives a message that the discs are USB2 so will not open.

I would appreciate advice as to how I get at my data on the two discs.

Many thanks

2

Hi there and welcome to the WD community.

Just to clarify, The drives that you have are My Passport wireless or normal USB drives? If they are My Passport Wireless I would like to know if this happens when you are connecting to the devices wirelessly over the network or just with the USB cables.

3

If you are connecting drives set up for a Windows machine, they will not work correctly on a Mac.  It appears that is what you are doing.

4

However there are software utilities that will allow you to view, and probably read/write to the drive, while connected to a Mac.

Google will help you find one. I use MacDrive software to do the reverse (read Mac HFS drives on my Windows PC). Apparently Paragon Software is okay and does what you need. http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

Also if your Acer is a Windows machine, and it gives you that error message, it must be very old and only have USB 1.1 support. Is it an old Windows XP laptop? Has XP been updated with all patches, as that may help. But it may not either. Theorectically any USB 2.0 drive connected to a USB 1.1 port should work, as they are usually backward compatible, but some early USB implementations were pretty dodgy.

5

A Mac can normally read a Windows (NTFS) drive, but only as read-only, and won’t be able to write to it.

There are programmes available which get around that (Paradox as RoderickGI mentions above, or alternatively  Tuxera). But if the drive won’t open at all, that suggests there’s something more fundamental wrong.

Can you be more clear exactly what model and type your external discs are, and what their connections are. That will make things easier to help you with.

6

Also, this thread is in the wrong forum, UNLESS the drives in question are My Passport WIRELESS types, which does not seem to be the case.