WD 1TB External Hard Drive not working

I first purchased this product from Best Buy in July. It worked fine on my PC. I get on to the iMac in August (6 months ago from yesterday, happy anniversary), and it takes FOREVER! I reformatted it to Mac OS Extended. I repaired the disk permissions, did everything to possibly make it faster.
It takes 50 hours to move 91 GB, when the same 91 GB could be moved from my PC to it in a little over an hour (give or take 15 to 30 minutes). Even a 70 MB file takes up to 10 minutes to transfer, which on the old system, it would take seconds.

Unfortuanately WD external HD's have a pretty bad reputation with Macs. It has something to do with their enclosures as their internal HD's seem to work just fine. I would recommend exchanging that drive for one with a higher quality enclose. Just about any other manufacturer would be fine however the 3 best IMHO are:
OWC Mercury Elite Pro series
Lacie Quadra d2 series
G-Tech G-Drive series
All have similar features and build quality. I would be comfortable using any of the three but I've been successfully been using the Lacie's for 3+ years.
Roger

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Thunderbolt 2 external hard drive not working with Macbook Pro (early 2011)

Hi,
I'm new to this forum and I hope you guys can help me with this:
I've recently bought an external hard drive that works on Thunderbolt 2 (LaCie d2 3TB). When I connect the new drive to my Macbook Pro through the thunderbolt port, the drive isn't recognized. However, the drive works fine through a USB connection.
I thought that Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2 are compatible, however this doesn't seem to be the case. Maybe it's because the OS X / driver / firmware version that I'm working on that is not updated? I work on an early 2011 Macbook Pro: OS X Version 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard).
Thank you very much for your help!
Daniel

Hi danielsh6,
I recently bought the new Lacie Thunderbolt 2 D2 3TB and I had the same problem as you, i have a macbook pro early 2011, those support thunderbolt but many times there is a bug that doesn't let you connect any thunderbolt drives to your computer. The solution I found was installing this update:
Thunderbolt Firmware Update v1.0
Before doing this I would recommend you updating to mountain lion (not yosemite yet as there is still some glitches and more on preview's macbook pro's).
Hope this helped!
Forest

External hard drive not working with Time Machine

I have an Iomega network hard drive attached via ethernet cable to my Airport Extreme router.
I plugged the hard drive in. Everything works like it should. I can see the drive in Finder and I can read and write to the drive. I do share the network drive in a mixed WIN and OS X environment. I never had to reformat the drive and I can read/write to the drive with no problems from all of my computers.
I turned on Time Machine on my iMac and walked through the simple setup screens there. I never set anything up on the hard drive through the drive interface software. And Time Machine worked fine for about 4 months. Then all of a sudden, Time Machine just stopped backing up and I got all kinds of error messages saying that the TIme Machine backup failed.
So I went into Time Machine, turned it off, turned it back on. No luck. Same error messages.
So I started fresh. I deleted the prior Time Machine backups and I am back at the TIme Machine set up screen. OS X can see the TIme Machine share on my external hard drive and I tell the setup wizard that's the drive I want to use.
Then I get a window that says it's trying to connect to the external hard drive which I call "Cloud_Drive". After about 30 seconds, I get an error window that says
"There was a problem connecting to the server "Cloud_Drive-TimeMachine"
The server may not exist or it is unavailable at this time. Check the server name or IP address, check your network connection, and then try again.
At this point the external drive is still visible in FInder and I can read/write to it from my iMac. I just cannot understand why Time Machine was working and then all of a sudden it stopped.
I did go into the software management of the drive and found an area in which to turn Time Machine on on the drive's side. Which I never did before so I turned it on and then I'm prompted to enter the name of the computer and the ethernet ID. I entered the name of the iMac and I have tried using the WiFI MAC address - no luck getting TIme Machine to work and I've also entered Terminal, found a MAC address under the line titled "ether" and still the same result.
I have also changed the destination of the Time Machine files on the external hard drive and the Time Machine wizard does write a sparcebundle file to that new location but still get the same error message above.

Is it a firewire ext. HD?
Yes, many are reporting same, there is a firewire fault and TB HD on external HD from LaCie (Seagate) and from WD especially.
Technicians are looking into it.
Until there is resolution, consider setting up a USB ext. Time machine HD.
Until then consider confining Mavericks use with USB HD.
Ive tested a long line of USB HD on Mavericks, all seem fine.

Time Machine Restore from Networked external hard drive - not working??

recap: hard drive failure on iMac. Took it to Genius folks, they installed a new hard drive with updated Leopard OSx on it.
I came home turned it on, selected "restore from time machine" feature. It finds my external hard drive (which is connected to an airport extreme via USB 2.0) My computer is connected via ethernet to the airport extreme.
I select the imac backup and up pops the login screen. I log in. Then I get the "Checking Time Machine Backup...." And it just keeps checking and checking. The external hard drive is making all sorts of noises, like it is working away, but it just keeps checking. Also have the spinning beach ball....
How long does this go on before we get on with it?

LOL.. didn't see your answer until now. I feel pretty good as I did exactly what you recommended. Thanks so much for taking the time to respond. I appreciate it.
Here's the rundown on what I did.
LOL. I see y'all didn't know what to do either!!
Well after puzzling for a bit I finally aborted the process. I tried connecting my hard drive directly to the computer - but then it would not recognize the backup on the external drive.
So finally, I rebooted using the install disk and selected utilities and restore and voila, we were in business.
Restore said it would take 16 hours and went to bed - 11am. Got up at 5 and it was complete (guess it really didn't take that long) So far, everything looks great!!!!!
Hope this helps someone out there.

External Hard drive not working

I just bought a 1 TB G Drive. Did so because my 2008 Macbook became very slow and wanted to back up all my data. I first tried doing so through disk utility and I thought it backed it up but when I checked nothing was there. Then went through time machine and it said it wouldn't back up because of a specific file. When I went back into disk utility I tried backing up through there again and it said it had an error with connection or something (but I thought that was because my computer went into sleep mode). Then I went back into time machine and it didn't recognize my external hard drive - so I went back into disk utility and it didn't show up on there either.
I am so confused. I was told my an apple employee how to back it up, I followed their instructions which weren't rocket science and it just doesn't make sense to me. Why is it so difficult having my computer backed up?
I read when time machine says there's a unreadable file that could mean something bad. But I'm more concerned with my HD not even being seen by my computer as before I could at least copy and paste files into HD.
I'm not mac savy and don't understand computer tech lingo.

Hi ,
welcome to HP support forums
i wish you to enjoy your time here
please ,
give me more info about your external HDD brand so i can search for more info about it and find out if it needs a specific driver
also , i want you to check your USB port you use
using another port may help , it can be only a problem with the USB port itself or the Driver
anothrt hard TIP : (Use it if you are good with SW problems only)
1.Use Ubuntu Live Disc without installing
2.connect the external HDD and wait till ubuntu discover it
3.now try copying anything t the HDD
now you will face two situations :
1. the copying process will work fine with no errors and now you know it was only a problem with the OS you are using (WIN 7)
2. the copying process won't complete and now there is also two possible things
the first is the USB port or the USB cable you are using >> try replacing it and change the port and repeat
the secong is that the new HDD has a problem or a Bad firmware maybe >> your old HDD has no relation with the problem now as Ubuntu starts in Live mode without using the internal HDD it starts depends on the CD itself and your Ram
Hope this to help you
don't hesitate to Ask again
Please mark my post as SOLVED if it has resolved your problem. It helps others with similar situations.
Mark Th. Antonio
Faculty Of Engineering Alexandria University

WD External Hard drive not working with new Macbook Pro

I have recently upgraded to a new Macbook Pro and when connecting a WD 1 TB Passport external hard drive, it doesn't appear on the MBP, but when I connect it to my old Macbook running 10.5.8, it appears normally. Is this a problem with formatting or an issue because it is USB 2.0...
Any help appreciated as I have a lot of data on the hard drive and would like to be able to use it with my new MBP.

I'm on Lion, with similar issues with two WD external HD. But what I found fixed the problem was to:
1. go to the manufacturer's website (in this case Western Digital),
2. locate my external HD, download the download.
For instance, I downloaded the WD Drive Utilities for Mac (for My Passport for Mac USB 3.0):
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=219&sid=157&lang=en
Install the downloaded app.
3. Plug in external (this part, I think is important) directly into your tower or laptop (as opposed to through a USB multi-plug extender). Possibly this is because you access more power?
[I'm trying to remember in which order everything happened. But I think at this point the external hard drive mounted]
4. Install the software that is found on the external HD (in my case, it was a brand new device, so that had never been installed).
5. Run "WD Drive Utilities" and run diagnostics.
6. Test to see if it holds. Unmount the External HD. Unplug. Replug in and see if it mounts.
Note: I have not yet tested to see if plugging in the external somewhere other than directly into the tower also works. But I think the main problem is getting it to mount the first time and installing the software. That's what I think.

External hard drive not working on iMac

I have a lacie external harddrive that i used on a pc. i am trying to use it on my new iMac but I can't access files or transfer files from the external hard drive to my iMac or vice versa. How can I fix this problem? Should I format it to work on my iMac and if so, will that wipe my external harddrive clean.

The above method may not work with contacts that were created by an older version of the Contacts application.
Triple-click the line below to select it:
~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C).
Starting from the Finder, locate the snapshot from which you want to restore. Press the key combination shift-command-G. Paste into the text box that opens (command-V) and press return. Select the AddressBook folder in the snapshot, then right-click and select
Restore "AddressBook" to...
from the contextual menu. Choose the Desktop as the location.
Exit Time Machine and open Contacts. From the menu bar, select
File ▹ Import...
Import the file "AddressBook-v22.abcddb" from the folder you created on the Desktop. After importing, you can delete the folder.

External hard drive not working in USB multi-port adapter

Hi,
I was wondering if anyone had a suggestion...I got a new My Passport Essential portable external hard-drive. I have a Belkin multi (4) USB adapter and when I plug the hard-drive in, it won't recognize it. It only works if I directly plug it into one of the two USB ports on my computer. Does anyone know of a USB multi-port adapter that would have sufficient power for me to plug my hard-drive into it? The cord is too big and bulky to plug it into my other USB port on my laptop with the adapter in place, so I either have to get another adapter or try another external hard-drive.
thank you! Robin DySard

Hi UKPOL,
Please refer to this How to Geek article.
Win 8.1 no longer supports a graphical interface for backing up files or creating system images. You must use powershell or Win 8.1's reset/refresh options.
You can also create custom refresh images. Please see this article. The instructions also work with Win 8.1.
You would have to use third party backup software for backing up files and folders.
Jaco
****I am not an HP employee****
Please give a" Kudos" if advice received is relevant or" Accept as Solution" if your problem has been solved.
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H8 1380t CTO, Intel i7 3820
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Pegatron Motherboard- IPIWB-PB (Pittsburgh), Radeon HD 7570 1GB. Win 7 Home Premium upgraded to Windows 8.1 Pro.
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12 GB DDR3
Pittsburgh2 Mainboard, NVIDIA GTX 645- 2GB GDDR5. Win 8.1 Pro.
HP 560z CTO AMD Phenom II X6 1090T
16 GB DDR3.
Radeon HD 6570
Win 7 Home Premium upgraded to Win 7 Pro.
HP ENVY 17t-j000 CTO Quad Edition Notebook. I7 4702mq
12 GB DDR3
Nvidia Graphics
Win 8 Pro
Errare humanum est.

External Hard Drive not working after installing mavericks

After installing mavericks, I hooked up my external hard drive,
and it would not show up on the computer. Tried checking if
it showed in utilities, also a no show.
Should I uninstall the ntfs software which is a few years
old and instal a newer version?
Looking for a solution which doesn't involve reformatting my nearly full
1TB EHD, please :)

I think I have version 10.8.6 of mavericks, not 10.9.

External Hard Drive Not Working Anymore

I got a little hard drive which has two partitions formated with NTFS and the other one for Mac (forgot what it was called...HFS or so?).
Well..none of those partitions work like they are supposed to. When I connect the hard drive it shows me both partitions mounted but when I try to unmount them it just won't work. It says it is in use but I am sure that they are not. I tried formating them in Disk Utility which didn't work cause it could not unmount the drive.
So what I'm trying to find is a way to make my external hard drive usable but I just don't know how and what to use. I'm not very familiar with disk repair utilities.
Some other problems are that I can't copy anything onto/from the hard drive or i doesn't show me anything in Finder eventhough there's a bunch of stuff on there.
I don't know if you need this info but I'm on a MacBook Pro running 10.5.4 and the hard drive is Mac-compatible.
Every help is appreciated!

If you don't have any information on the drive which you need, try this:
* Boot from the Leopard DVD.
* Chose Disk Utility from the menu.
* In the list, you'll get two listings for your external drive. Choose one at the top which isn't indented that lists the drive size first (for example, 298.1 GB WD 3200JS External Media).
* Click the Erase tab.
* Set format to Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)
* Click Security Options and select "Zero Out Data"
* Click Erase...
This should hopefully wipe the drive completely clean, erasing the other partitions and making sure the the whole disk is writable. If this doesn't work, I would suspect a hardware issue with the drive. Once this is done, you can repartition the drive as needed.

External Hard drive not working on my Macbook Air

I've been using my external hard drive for more than 6months now on my mac and for some reason today it won't show up. I've run a disk utility check on it, and tried repairing it but it just says that it has an error and can not be fixed. I am quite stressed about this because it works fine when I use it on my tv and I am able to access my files, but unfortunately because of the low amount of data storage on the macbook air I am unable to save a lot on it, therefore have my external hard drive to save everything on. I am a university student with assignments due very soon! I need help please and urgently!

The EHD has failed and needs to be replaced. If you have not been backing it up then you are about to learn a difficult lesson about why backing up is absolutely critical.
If you have another computer available and that machine can see the data on the EHD then copy the data to that computer. When you replace the EHD simply move the data back.
Good luck.

External hard drive not working on yosemite

I have just upgraded to yosemite and my external hard drive (Iomega, usb self powered) which I use to store all my professional work on is not being recognized. I cannot revert to mavericks as I dont have a time machine backup and I dont want to reformat the hard drive as I will lose over 2 years of work! What can I do?

Apple doesn’t routinely monitor the discussions. These are mostly user to user discussions.
Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem solved sooner.
Feedback
Or you can use your Apple ID to register with this site and go the Apple BugReporter. Supposedly you will get an answer if you submit feedback.
Feedback via Apple Developer

Macbook pro slow with 1tb external hard drive not fully utilized

I have a 13" macbook pro (late 2011 model) 8GB ram (1333mhz) and 500gb sata drive. I use photoshop CS6 and Lightroom quite frequently and all my images are stored on a 1tb external seagate drive. The drive is 70% full but the macbook is not able to open folders. The drive does show up in the finder but seems blank though all the files are on it. I do not keep much on my internal hard drive so the computer is not inundated with data in anyway. Please let me know how I can fix this

Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
{ diskutil list; echo; diskutil cs list; } | open -ef
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C.
Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window by pressing the key combination command-V. I've tested these instructions only with the Safari web browser. If you use another browser, you may have to press the return key after pasting.
Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear.
A TextEdit window will open with the output of the command. If the command produced no output, the window will be empty. Post the contents of the TextEdit window (not the Terminal window), if any — the text, please, not a screenshot. The title of the window doesn't matter, and you don't need to post that.
If any personal information appears in the output, anonymize before posting, but don’t remove the context.

Western Digital external hard drive not working properly

I have this external hard drive from western digital, 2 TB space, in wich i stored data from a windows machine.
Now i moved to an arch machine (the one i have at home) and it doesn't mount the hard drive.
I tried as normal user and as root, i tried just
mount /dev/sdc1
and most of the variants (-t filesystem, -o force and so on)
the first one obviously didn't work, the device is'n in my fstab file, but it's not my problem.
here i post the output of "fdisk -l /dev/sdc":
sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc
[sudo] password for pertica:
Disk /dev/sdc: 1,8 TiB, 2000396746752 bytes, 3907024896 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x0002de0f
Dispositivo Avvio Start Fine Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 2048 3907029167 1953513560 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
so, my problem isn't the filesystem (i think it is NTFS, but i'm not so sure after all), also.
I tried then to open /dev/sdc (the hard drive) with gparted, and it does not recognise any partition
(the only thing it says is, translated from italian: "it is not possible to have a partition out of the disk")
At first, i belived it could be something to be solved by "fsck", but it didn't seem to help.
Then, i checked more carefully the output of "fdisk -l /dev/sdc", and i found out that the end of the partition
sdc1 ("Fine" in italian) was at sector 3907029167 while the disk has only 3907024896.
Now, how can i fix this? (possibly without erasing the whole disk?)

Shh, don't spoil his reading work

LaCie FireWire External Hard Drive NOT working ...

I have a 250GB LaCie External Hard Drive plugged via FireWire into my Desktop and it is NOT working properly for the last 12-14 months. I have tried several things, including taking it to the store, and nothing seems to fix the problem. I even upgraded the RAM to 1.25 GB, but that did not solve this problem (I never thought this was the problem, but the guy at the Genius Bar suggested so). The most frustrating of all is that sometimes it works (20% of the time) and most of the time it is just not working. Also, when I use it with my MacBook, it works just fine, so this gives me a little bit of a clue that the problem is the desktop, not the Hard Drive, this is why I did not buy a new HDrive, and this is why I am asking help here. (By the way, when I try to eject the LaCie from my Desktop, it says it can't be done because the disk is in use -which I know is not)
Here is the thing as today. Last week I was able to drag some music from my iTunes to my HD using my MacBook. I connected my LaCie back to my desktop (which is where I need it to be) and I can NOT copy any file from my desktop to my LaCie Hardrive. It gives an error message like "The name is too long for the destination". Really weird! If I change the name it still says the same. So when I want to save a CD to my LaCie (which is the main purpose of me having an External Hard Drive, I just can't do it).
When I try to open files from the LaCie, it is fine as long as it is a jpeg or a .doc file. MP3 files won't open, and an error will show like this: Disk could not be read from or written to. I can drag files from LaCie to my dektop, but again, only .doc or .jpeg files.
In regards to the Time Machine, I completely gave that up. It would not back up, it would freeze the computer ... I really don't care about that, really. All I want is my External Hard Drive to be able to save my mp3 files safely, since I have thousands of files in mp3 format.
I tried to use Disk Utility to verify and/or repair de disk, but I was not successful with that either. When repairing, after not even a minute it says "Disk could not be unmounted". When trying to verify, it would say "Filesystem verify or repair failed".
I am DESPERATELY asking for help. I am just a regular guy with few computer knowledge. I just want my Apple to work, that is why I use Apple and not PC. But I need someone who could give me advice on how to fix this problem.
Thank YOU very much!

{quote}
My desktop has two FireWire ports. In the first one I had my webcam plugged in. In the second one, the External Hard Drive. I unplugged the camera and used the first port for my External HDrive and now it works! So it seems the problem is a hardware problem with the port.
I'd check to see if the problem returns when you plug the camera back into the second port, or if the drive works in the original port when the camera is not connected.
Edit: Maybe you unplugged the problem, when you unplugged the camera?
Message was edited by: dechamp

WD 1TB External Hard Drive not working

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