11-23-2010, 02:07 PM

Need some help here, if possible!
Bought a WD My Passport Essential 500gb HDD the other day, and when plugged in, it would not work, as it 'counld not un-mount a volume on the drive'. So, ejected it via command 'E', and through Disc Utility, re-formatted it to mac, selecting the GUID, 1 Partition, OS Extended (Journaled) and applied that. Worked! Cleared hard-drive and was then able to back-up a folder onto it.
So now, When I plug it into either my MacBook Pro, or jan 2010 Imac, it doesn't show up!
Any ideas what the problem might be? Cant really be the usb cable if it worked 2 days ago, can it?
Thanks for any forthcoming help and advice,
Keith

11-23-2010, 02:21 PM

I'm sure that you have the "Show hard drives on desktop" option selected in the Finder preferences so we'll assume that's OK.

Swap USB ports, USB cables. If that doesn't work, see if you can mount the drive on another Mac or PC if you have one handy. But really, if the drive doesn't mount or show up on either of your machines, it may be defective. Another thing that's possible is if the drive needs more power than your machines are supplying from the USB ports.

The WD Passports should work straight from USB without an adapter but I have run into some that won't. If all else fails, return the drive for a refund.

11-23-2010, 02:28 PM

Thanks Chscag,
I reackon it could be a power thing regarding the wd usb cable. I looked around and found an apple usb extention cable and connected the HDD to the mac through that, (and it's worked!!!) The usb connection port on the hard-drive is different to the usual connections (it's rounded at the corners, never seen that before) so my other cables dont fit. Can only assume the extention cable has helped transfer more juice from the computer to power the hard-drive. It's an ubly sight though so gonna need to find a better solution.
Cheers for the advice!
Keith