WD My Passport can't copy files from mac, but only copy files to mac

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87 points

WD My Passport can't copy files from mac, but only copy files to mac

I have eventually got my personal mac, the problem is I have a WD My Passport portable HD, with all my art, photos, and data I had done with the PC. I wish to copy files from my mac to the drive, it wont allow me. But when I open and copy files from the drive to the mac it works.

How do I fix this without formatting the drive ?

Will setting up the time machine of my mac erase the contents on the drive ?

Thank you.

MacBook, OS X Mavericks (10.9.2)

Posted on May 14, 2014 6:05 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

norm123

Community Specialist

May 16, 2014 9:33 AM in response to Zanaelf

Hello Zanaelf

If you look at the format of the external hard drive, it is probable setup to NTFS and is something that Macs can read and copy from but cannot write to it. The only way you can do that is to reformat the drive to either so that it will be for Macs to write to or you can format it to FAT and it can read and write to both. Check out the articles below for more information. Also check out the other discussion that I provided as another user found a 3rd party piece of software that may assist you further if you do not want to reformat the drive.

Disk Utility 12.x: Format a disk for Windows computers

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH5819

Disk Utility 12.x: Erase a disk, CD, or DVD

http://support.apple.com/kb/ph5849

How can I save files from Mac OS X to a NTFS drive?

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5076451

Regards,

-Norm G.

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Answer 2

Zanaelf Author

Level 1

87 points

May 17, 2014 10:34 AM in response to norm123

Thank you very much, obviously it is what I feared , a forced reformat of the passport drive to FAT 32. Unfortuantely I cant do that at the moment because I would have to buy another 1TB drive just to back the files up, and do not have money to spend like that for another 2 or 3 months. However, I have found a way to work around this is to install a micrisoft windows operating system on the make via a virtual machine, where your mac and the virtual machine are like intergrated, so that the desktop on the Mac is shared to the desktop on the virtual PC inside the mac. Then move the NTFS drive to be connected to the virtual pc , and then drag and drop the files or copy and pase them from the mac onto the drive that is connected to the virtual pc, which is connected physically to on your Mac's USB.

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Answer 3

Zanaelf Author

Level 1

87 points

May 17, 2014 10:39 AM in response to Zanaelf

But it is s tempory fix to retrieve space on the mac to copy and store files, and read and write, but the Time Machine thing won work unless like you say that I have to format the drive into a FAT32 system.

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Answer 4

norm123

Community Specialist

May 20, 2014 12:11 PM in response to Zanaelf

Hey Zanaelf

Actually, Time Machine will only work on the Mac format, which is HFS+, and then you would not be able to read and write from a Windows PC. So the idea would be to have one drive be your Time Machine back up and the other drive be the drive that you can use between a Mac and Windows and have it formatted for FAT32 for the cross compatibility.

Mac Basics: Time Machine backs up your Mac

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

Regards,

-Norm G.

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Answer 5

Zanaelf Author

Level 1

87 points

May 21, 2014 6:55 PM in response to norm123

Thanks, well I would have to get another drive then, first I am planing to upgrade the Macbooks internal hard drive... 160Gbs is alreay an irritation... can you dump a time machine save on the same HDD if it is partitioned ?

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Answer 6

Oct 27, 2016 7:27 AM in response to Zanaelf

Can you put a link or just a name for this virtual program or software ? please i have exactly the same problem 😟

thank you.

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Answer 7

mlecorre

Level 1

4 points

Apr 20, 2017 2:01 PM in response to Zanaelf

I had 30 GB of photos to move. This is how I did it:

Copy the files onto an SD card, then move the files from the SD card onto the new PC hard drive.

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