WD ext. HD no longer works in mac, only 3 days old

Z

ziomatrixacs

Registered
Well, my 30gb ibook hard drive was filling up rapidly so I got a 500gb western digital "my passport" portable external hard drive. I plug it in and it takes 1 minute to show up on my desk top. Ok, so I go ahead and back up my computer and it takes a few hours. I notices it took about 30-40 minutes to put 1.7gb (not 17gb) onto the hard drive with USB 2.0. Far from the 1gb per minute I read online.
Okie dokie. I go to my windows XP pc to put a 5gb file onto the new hard drive and it wont allow me. It lets me only put 4gb files on.. Ok so its FAT32 format. So I throw some 2 and 3gb files onto it. The next few days I use it with my mac for a few minutes every once in a while, just to drag and drop a file or two. Now for no apparent reason it wont work at all! I have not dropped the hard drive, no formating or anything. All I did was plug it in and use it. The only other thing I can think of was connecting to the internet but that doesnt make sense, none of their included software (which I deleted upon opening) was mac compatible so why would this happen?

Now I plug it in and the HD light blinks like it used to but nothing shows up on my mac. So I do the next logical thing, plug it into my buddies mac, 5 minutes later and nothing appears. I restart my computer and try it again. Nothing. I open disc utility and it show the name of the disk, and it showed me another one under it (which is normal, it does this with everything) The name under it was grayed out though. I hit verify disc and it says it was doing something but it didnt. I hit stop then it says the disc is OK. My friend boots up in XP through Fusion and I plug the hard disc in and whaddya know, it comes up and works! No problems at all. I plug it into my mac again and nothing comes up. I started disc utility and now nothing shows up, I just get that loading symbol (not the pinwheel, the other black one)

So, here is how it went
(Without internet)
Works with mac, takes 1 minute to show up
Works with PC, still takes 1 minute to show up
Still works with mac
Then I connected to the internet
Now it wont work with OS 10.4 or 10.5 but works on XP


Could anyone help me out? I had bad experiences with Maxtor and seagate drives, I hope western digital isnt crap too. I read some reviews and they all said the drive was slow and had a high failure rate :(
 
Oh forgot to mention, I use both PC and mac so Id like to keep it as compatible as possible. I thought about making a mac side and a PC side though. If anyone can help, that wwould be awesome..
 
I don't know how to set up a pc to mac network. I tried before but didn't get it to workout right. My pc only has a Ethernet and dial up port, no wireless. It seems like a bandaid and not a cure too.
 
It's easy -- do you have a router? A wireless router? What brand?

If so, plug the PC into the router, and leave the Mac on wireless. Then, it's as simple as sharing a drive from your Windows computer -- or, conversely, formatting the drive as HFS+ and sharing it from the Mac side (which entails turning on File Sharing and activating SMB in the "Sharing" pane of the System Preferences).

This setup is, in fact, not a band-aid style fix. I would see it as the most desirable setup, as plugging and re-plugging a drive from Mac to PC would get tedious after a while. With a networked drive, you don't have to do any manual labor in order to access the drive from both machines.
 
We donthave a router or Internet at home. Since I'm leaving home soon I won't be able to get to the pc. The pc is also buggy as heck. I bought the thing to use with my mac and it used to work now it doesn't, I want it to work on the mac ya know?
 
If you want true, 100% compatibility with Mac, then I suggest you format the drive as HFS+ -- not FAT32.

"As compatible as possible" with both Mac and PC doesn't mean that it will work 100% on the PC side as well as 100% on the Mac side. You have MacDrive installed on your PC, right? Why not format the whole drive as one, big, HFS+ partition, then create two folders at the root of the hard drive -- one named "Mac" and one named "PC," then throw all your Mac documents into one folder and PC documents into the other?
 
i dont have mac drive, I need to get it though. I thought mac could only read NFS+ but not write to it?

Ill format it soon as I figure out why the heck I cant see the hard drive icon on my mac anymore. I see no reason why it shouldnt show up any more. I have ejected it properly, never dropped it or anything that could damage it.. If it worked before why not now??
 
Ok so I plugged it in then opened disc utility and then unpluged it. I plugged it back in then it showed up but it wont mount for some reason. Disc utility said try first aid on it, so I clicked it .. it has been at the screen for a few minutes now with no noticeable pprogress..
 
Ok this is WEIRD

It never "repaired" so I stopped it, then went to partition the main drive and then i said nah, ill just take it back to the store. I click eject and it ejected, I unpluged it, pluged it back in, walked away and sure nuff' it poped up and worked just fine..

WEIRD
 
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