Passport External Drive Issues

Love, love, love my new iMac BUT... I am having a problem using my Passport external drive with it. It recognizes it, but every few minutes it will lose the contact and then give me an error message about not having removed the device properly. (I did nothing) It is more than a tad annoying as I work mostly with Photoshop and I have been trying to work on on an image in camera raw, and just as I find the image I want the connection is lost. Has anyone else had this problem and found a solution please?

Hi KathrynG
Welcome to Apple Discussions
If your plugging it into the keyboard, try connecting it to a port on the back of the iMac for a couple of reasons. (1) The keyboard may not supply enough power and (2) The keyboard's bus speed is the slower USB 1.1 instead of High Speed USB 2.0
I also know that the passport's cord is short and stiff and about impossible to connect to a port on the back of the iMac. I easily connect mine to a powered hub sitting on my desk that has a port on the front. You might want to consider a USB hub, a USB extension cable or longer cable to use with the WD Passport.
Dennis

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HELP! WD Passport External Drive stopped being recognized by my Mac

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Since I've tested it using different ports, different connecting wires, and different computers, I'm thinking chances are the problem is with the hardware of the external HD itself (i.e. worst case scenario).
Before shipping my external HD off to get repaired or to get the data recovered, can anyone think of any reason why it would be a software issue? I read something about updating the "firmware" but I have no idea what that is. I guess I'm still holding out hope that the drive isn't fried because when I plug it in it does try to spin and start up instead of just remaining dead.
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This happened out of the blue. It worked fine for 2 years. No problems. Then today when I plug it into my Mac, I hear it spin for about a minute but my Mac won't recognize it. The drive doesn't show up at all, anywhere, including the Disc Utility. The external drive also appears to be in fine working condition --- I have never seen it overheat, and I have never heard any noises coming form it. I also tried a different Firewire, and the same thing happened, so that's not the problem.
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Sounds like you'll need to access that drive while it is not booted. You need to replace it anyway, so do that, then one way or another (ext enclusure, et), access it and copy files.
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Do both HDDs operate correctly when attached individually and do so on all USB ports? If so, the MBP should be able to power both.
Try SMC and Pram resets:
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379
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USB external drive issues

Just connected my external drive to my Airport Extreme and when I click on Disk in Airport Utility, it sees the disk. However, whenever I try to do a backup, it fails. I get an exclamation point in the Time Machine symbol (top right corner of the menu bar). When I click on the symbol and open up the preferences, it shows the name of the drive (so clearly it is seeing it) but next to Available, all I see is "--". Can anyone help?

Two things strike me:
Have you been able to get any USB drive to work in the port, even a "thumb drive"? That might help you differentiate between a problem with the drive and problem with the router's port. I don't have a MyBook drive, but I'd be shocked beyond belief if this was a compatibility issue. Yes, I know that truth is often stranger than fiction, but to get that status, it first has to be proven true and then strange. At this point every USB device I've plugged into that port on the back of the router has been recognized, that includes a WD Passport drive.
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My Passport External Drive Not Recognized

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Shteeg wrote:
I connected it to the USB port and installed the software.
Installed the software? Please explain.
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TL:DR?
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Energy Saver
Restore Defaults
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Open up Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility. Select your external drive on the left then under the Erase tab select MS-DOS(FAT) as your volume format. Keep in mind that re-formatting your drive will erase all of the data so make sure you have it all backed up on your computer before you re-format.
http://ftp.georgetek.com/George/DiskUtilMS-DOS.png
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Another external drive issue with Frontrow

I've already looked at these treads,
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1511877&tstart=2
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8593111&#8593111
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Hello Brett!,
A rule i usually live by when purchasing externals, is to firstly check the file format (many are factory formatted in NTFS or FAT32) and if that is the case then change them to HFS+ using disk utility. That is of course if you intend to only use it with your mac, for example i use an external formatted in FAT32 and it works on Windows and Mac.
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Encrypted External Drive Issue

I have a WD 1TB external hard drive I formatted / encrypted using the Disk Utility function when I was running Lion. I have since upgraded to Mountain Lion and whilst I can still view and read the files from my Mac, I cannot seem to delete the files, or at least they show as deleted, but no additional space is made available on the drive. The drive does not seem to be completely compatible with Mountain Lion. Has anyone encountered a similar issue and have a solution that does not involve me reformatting my external hard drive? Thank you in advance for any responses.

Hi, I tried your advice and it tells me the external drive is ok, and the ERASE section is grey, probably because I encrypted the disk!?!
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Passport External Drive Issues

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