New WD Passport Studio Causing Problems

So to update:

The second 100gb folder transferred fine. And the drive has been working well for me so far, I am using it for final cut so it has been under some labor intensive work with no issues.

I will post again if it fails on me but for now all is well.

My suggestion is download the new manager and get rid of the turbo (if installed)

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=205&sid=61&lang=en

Oh and thanks bluztoo good to hear that it can work successfully, helps to boost my faith in the product.

Hi everybody,
I just read your posts, and I'm quite angry. I operate an old Powerbook G4 12", and having some trouble with my hard drive, I purchased the WDMyPassportStudio to be able to boot from an external portable drive in case my HD crashed completely.
(Old macs like mine can only boot from firewire external drives…)
First, I experienced some erratic behaviour like you mention, the drive occasionally not mounting, I wonder if there may be a problem with the FW connection cable, or too little power coming from my computer, for I noticed that the drive mounts better when connected through an external Formac FW drive with separate power supply.
But what I feel most angry about is the fact that WD external drives are not bootable from Firewire. Does anybody know where I could get a list of external portable Hard Drives that are Firewire400-bootable under Mac OS 10.4.11? Don't you feel WD should communicate about this non-FW-bootability of their drives?
Thanks for any help!

Okay so my final word on this drive is take it back!

It worked ok for a while and then it started to lag with simple tasks like looking at folders with quicklook etc (my 'mybook studio' doesn't have any issues with this) and when the drive started to unmount itself I gave up, formatted it and returned it to the shop. I have a Lacie rugged on order so we'll see how that goes.

berlugana - any of the Other World Computing drives (http://eshop.macsales.com) will boot for you. I have one of their Mercury On-The-Go firewire-800 bus-powered drives that I've been cloning my powerbook to and booting from for quite awhile.

I recently got a Western Digital My Passport Studio (WD5000MT) and things are not good. Things started going down hill when my laptop locked-up hard trying to transfer my iTunes library to the drive. After I updated the drivers and the WD Drive Manager software it came with, the thing no longer crashed the system, but the drive would eventually stop responding during a long file transfer.

What seemed to get things working was junking the Western Digital software (drivers and manager) and reformatting the drive.

1. First and foremost, eject and unplug the drive.
2. Unload the Western Digital software.
- In a terminal, type kextstat to see a list of loaded system software.
- For each item having a name that starts with com.wdc, type *sudo kextunload -b ITEM_NAME*.
- Remove the files WD1394HPDriver.kext and WDUSBHPDriver.kext from /System/Library/Extensions/.
3. Plug the drive in.
4. Open Disk Utility and reformat the drive. Select the drive on the left, and then use the Partition tab to delete the existing partition(s) and create a new one. This will erase the drive.

Freshly formatted and without the Western Digital software, things seem to be working great.

Hi, any news on this? Actually I'm in the same situation and 'not very happy' with my new external disk. I think I've tried all the posted steps no a several times without any improvement of the whole situation. Has anyone solved the problem yet?
Cheers

It says this is "Answered", exactly where is the answer?
I just bought the passport studio for mac 500gb, and it will NOT work with firewire 800 plugged into a powerbook G4. All it does is lock up when you try to do anything. If you try to plug in the usb, the drive makes a hitting noise. It will work with the firewire 400 plug, but it still acts up from time to time and freezes the computer. It seems like WD is selling a problem to us. This drive is specifically marketed to Mac users, so I think it should actually WORK for mac users..........

The thing to do is not to reformat the drive, but to *return it for a refund*. Or if you can no longer do that, remove the bare drive from its lousy WD enclosure and put it into a good one, such as one of OWC's Mercury On-the-Go models:

http://eshop.macsales.com/search/On-the-go

Yes, these enclosures cost more than WD's junk enclosures. That's because they use reliable electronics.

+"The thing to do is not to reformat the drive, but to return it for a refund."+

Yep, I'll second that.

You may have read further above that I took back my WD, I now have a 500gb Lacie Rugged.

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=11084

It's a tiny bit bigger enclosure than the WD but who cares, its scratch resistant, you can apparently drop it from 2.2m and... it actually works!!

All the problems I had with the WD aren't even hinted at with this drive.

The 'My Book Studio' that I have still works fine but after the passport, I will never buy a WD product again, I'm scarred for life.

...but after the passport, I will never buy a WD product again, I'm scarred for life.

Don't overreact, even though it's tempting. WD makes fine hard drives at very good prices. It's the lousy chipsets they use in their external enclosures that give people fits. In my opinion there's no good reason not to buy a WD hard drive, as long as you don't buy it in a WD enclosure. A bare WD drive installed in a good enclosure from some other manufacturer is as dependable as any other consumer external drive.

If you're asking about the portable FreeAgent, called the FreeAgent Go, I recommend it highly. I've bought four of them (the 250GB USB-only version) for my family, and been delighted. One is the everyday bootable-clone backup of my MBP's internal drive that I carry with me everywhere. It's reliable, needs no external power supply, boots my MBP promptly without fuss when asked to do so, and is almost silent. Comes with a reasonably well padded slipcase and very small, handy USB cable that fits in a little elastic pocket on the outside of the case. Handsomely styled, very compact and portable, and very inexpensive: $70 on sale at Costco.

There's a "Mac version" with a FireWire port, too, but for the use I'm making of mine I don't need to pay $30 more for FireWire. I just trashed the Windoze-only software that was preinstalled on it, partitioned and formatted it in Disk Utility, and put it to work. Once I'd seen how satisfactory mine was, I bought them for my wife and two grown kids too.

They are 5400 RPM drives, not 7200 RPM, in case that matters to you.