WD My Passport - External hard drive

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WD My Passport - External hard drive

I have read through several posts on the WD. My Passport external hard drive, but being somewhat of a mac novice am still unsure of to go about installing, or as the case seems to be, not installing the smartware.

I want to back up my new MacBook Pro and assume using time machine is the most effective way to do this.

Any help or advice would be much appreciated.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Nov 15, 2010 6:28 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 15, 2010 7:08 AM in response to kadiee

You do not need any vendor software to use any external hard drive with your Mac. Just plug it in and use it. To be honest, most of the vendor stuff just causes problems, or at the least, just does nothing useful.

Once caveat, unless you specifically bought a "Mac" edition of a drive, it is likely going to be formatted as NTFS. While OS X can read NTFS volumes, it cannot natively write to them.

Your options are to use disc utility to:

a)Reformat the drive as an OS X native format (and repartition it to GUID partitioning scheme if you want to boot from it).

b)Reformat it as MS-DOS (i.e. FAT32) if you want to be able to read and write to it with both your Mac and a Windows computer.

c)buy some 3rd party application that will let your Mac read and write NTFS

To use it as a time machine backup, repartition it to GUID format, format it as OS X native (extended, journaled) and then follow these directions from Apple:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427

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