External hard drive

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Hi, I have a 500gig WD external hard drive. I apologise if this is the wrong forum to ask this.

I've been using it for a little while on my mac and pc. It is partitioned to work on both computers. When I open it on my pc only the 'pc' partition shows. When I open the drive on my mac the 'pc' and 'mac' partitions show and I can access everything.

Now however I can only access the drive via a pc. When I plug it into my mac the hard drive buzzes, the wd passport opens but not the actual drive and I cannot access either the 'pc' or 'mac' partitions. They do not appear on the desktop or in the disk utility.

Help! Please.
 
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How is the drive formatted? 1 partition, or more? what file structure - FAT, NTFS, MacOS Extended, other?
 

chscag

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Moved to correct forum. Not a Switcher topic.
 
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How is the drive formatted? 1 partition, or more? what file structure - FAT, NTFS, MacOS Extended, other?

Did you not read his post?

tngrocks said:
half the drive is FAT and i think the other is NTFS

If that's the case then the PC should have seen both partitions as did the Mac. On the MAc open disc utility (APPLICATIONS > UTILITIES) and see if the partitions show up there. If so you may be able to click the MOUNT button at the top of the window and have them mount.
 
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Since this is a WD drive, I know they come with some security software for you to activate. You know, where you have to enter a password to access the drive. Did you happen to activate it on the Windows side? I tried that with mine and the Macs didn't like it. Disabled it and it worked fine again.
 
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Apologies if this is the wrong place to post this as I am a newbie.

I have an external Western Digital drive which I used on my PC to store music, photos etc. I am currently converting to an iMac. Do I need to do anything to convert the drive for Mac use? Or would it be able to read it without conversion. I would need to preserve the existing files. Any help would be much appreciated.
 

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