Product: WD My Passport Ultra 1TB. Operating Systems: Mac & Linux. I recently used my WD Passport for a linux system. I formatted this drive in linux to ext4. Now I want to use this drive for my mac again but am having problems formatting this drive using disk utility to hfs. For some reason I can read/write and format this drive fine on linux. A WD My Passport formatted with Mac file system will be a dud on the Windows and vice-versa. Thankfully, MS-DOS FAT32 and ex-FAT formats have survived to date, and these are the file system to make your WD My Passport work with a Mac and a Windows PC simultaneously.
Deborah, if you plan to use drive for Quicken Backup only, the drive needs no special formatting. It’s data can go on any drive. What is important is if you are using a PC you use a PC formatted drive, but if you are using a Mac you should use a pre-formatted for Mac drive, it will make your life easier. WD sells both types. If you have not yet embarked on this project, consider this: The price of hard drives has really come down since you got the one you have. You can get a new one with twice the capacity at around half the price today.
For a PC, you can find a nice portable drive of 1TB capacity on sale for around $60-70. A Mac HD version will cost more, because manufacturers know Mac users are used to paying more for computer stuff (seriously!). Also, you likely do not need to erase everything on your current HD to make room for the Quicken backup. You likely need to remove a few gigabytes of data to make room for Quicken data so you can use your present drive without a massive erasing procedure. Hi there, JoeySmyth, just wanted to let you know that I first tried to delete the data that was on the WD My Passport. It was very stubborn and I resorted to formatting the drive. I set it up for my Quicken backups and so far have had no problems.
I was using a 7.5 GB thumb drive for the backups and it was full(!). I keep tax return copies and the Quicken backups because I’m such a nervous Nellie I was using the 200 GB Passport for all other backups until I bought a 3 TB My Book because now I have so much stuff! I want to thank you and Mike27Oct, for answering my questions and making me feel welcome to the forum. Good for you, Deb.
(You can just call me Mike; the second part of my username is my b-day as you may have guessed – it’s to differentiate me from all the other Mike’s in the world! And there are a variety of reasons a drive can be stubborn to allow deletion of certain files and folders, many of which would just likely bore you anyway to hear about them. Glad we made you feel welcome here.
Being nice goes a long way. Joey and I are regulars here, and we usually get things more right than wrong, although Joey does like to jab me with a “gotcha” once in a while if I got it wrong. Powered by, best viewed with JavaScript enabled.
Product: WD My Passport Ultra 1TB Operating Systems: Mac & Linux I recently used my WD Passport for a linux system. I formatted this drive in linux to ext4. Now I want to use this drive for my mac again but am having problems formatting this drive using disk utility to hfs. For some reason I can read/write and format this drive fine on linux. Also when viewing this drive in Disk Utility there are multiple instances of this drive.
Unmounting disk Creating the partition map Waiting for partitions to activate Formatting disk5s1 as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with name Untitled newfshfs: WriteBuffer: pwrite(3, 0x104ae4000, 1048576, 331354112): Input/output error newfshfs: write (sector 647176): Invalid argument Mounting disk Could not mount disk5s1 after erase EDIT #1 Palaeologus helped me find a solution to formatting the drive. Sudo su diskutil list cat /dev/random /dev/diskX Look for the drive and replace X with drive number. Then format drive as FAT. Diskutil eraseVolume ExFAT MyName diskX Once again replace X with disk number. The drive is now assessable. However I can only format the drive to FAT and not JHFS, formatting to JHFS returns the same error as described at the top of the post.