External Hard Drive Problems

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I got a 500 gig Western Digital My Book external hard drive before I got my MacBook so I could save all of my stuff off of my old gateway laptop which was on its last breath of life to transfer to my new mac when I got it. It comes preformatted with a HFS+ partition for Mac that can't be used on windows so to use it with my gateway I had to remove all of the stuff that came on it. Now that I have my MacBook I want to remove everything that is on it since I already transferred it over and use it for time capsule. When I try to delete what is on it I get this message: "Sorry, the operation could not be completed because an unexpected error occurred. (Error code -61)". I figured this was because I didn't have the files that came on the drive anymore so I got on the Western Digital site and downloaded the file I thought I needed, but I can't put it onto the drive because it says the drive can't be modified. I tried using parallels to download the file and add it to the drive but parallels doesn't recognize that the drive is connected.

Am I missing something obvious? Am I doomed to not be able to use my expensive drive? What should I do?
I appreciate any help I can get with this matter :D
 

chscag

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Your Mac's Specs
2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
Mount the drive on your Mac and Use Disk Utility to erase the drive. Then create a single HFS+ formatted partition on the drive and you should be good to go.

Regards.
 
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That sounds like a good idea. If only I knew how to do it...

I'm sorry I just got my mac and I don't know how to do a lot of stuff on it yet.
 
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2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM MacBook, 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
I have a similar problem. I also get the error you get in a lot of other applications, Sorry, an unexpected error occurred.
 

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