I recently bought a WD My Book Live to backup using Time Machine, now that I've upgraded to and my old NAS won't support Mountain Lion. The WD drive appears in the Finder, it doesn't appear as an option when setting up the backup disc in Time Machine.

The drive needs to be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

You can do this in Disk Utility by choosing the disk and going to the erase tab.

Do you have the WD Quick View software? And the latest firmware for the drive?

Get it all here: http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=902&sid=183&lang=en

There is no need for WD's software; in fact, it is quite often the source of problems. As long as (mentioned by Macjack) the drive is formatted using Disk Utility, there is no need for anything else.

To the OP: Have you tried to mount it manually in Disk Utility?

You do want to erase that WD software. There is absolutely no software required on a Mac on any external hard drive that I know of.

" now that I've upgraded to and my old NAS won't support Mountain Lion. "

Do you have a few words missing in the original question ?.

When i upgraded from LION to MOUNTAIN LION it made NO difference at all to my MyBook Live !!!

reading the original post again and again, do you in fact have two My Book Live units, an old one and a new one ?

tim

What is it "shared" with?

And, here is a screenshot of Disk Utility - note the greyed out option to mount my drive next to the burn button (it's greyed out because it is already mounted) - clicking on that would be manually mounting it:

Before you do that, disconnect it (since you can't drag the icon to the trash because it's not on your desktop), restart your Mac, and then reconnect it. Note: you may get a warning that you didn't properly eject it, but if it's a new and empty drive, it doesn't matter.

Connect the drive directly to your Mac, then DU will read it.

What LaCie is incompatible with ML? I have many of them runnig just fine.

You have a NAS and not an external hard drive. You can only format hard drive directly connected to the Mac via USB, SATA, FIrewire, etc, but not Ethernet.

The drive controller and file sharing on the NAS interfaces with the rest of the world, not the drive itself.

NAS Time Machine backups are only supported on the Time Capsule. Even then, I wouldn't trust it solely with my data.

Many of the HD companies have made NAS drives that they claim are Time Machine compatible. Does the one you bought claim that?

If so, you may want to contact them about how to make it show up in TM.

Edit: I just read through the user manual and found out there is a setting you must enable to turn on the Time Machine feature of the drive. Have you done that?

it mentions nothing about needing to set

adjust them in the Manual!

It was on pg 65 of the one (English version) I found on WD's support site.