WD 1TB external hard drive recognized by Mac, but Finder can't open it

Recently my Western Digital 1TB external HD is giving me problems... First it would read but wouldn't let me write and asked me to reformat, so I did a reformat (to NTFS) and at the beginning it seemed fine.... All of a sudden this morning when I try to backup something from my Air (FYI: tried on my 15" MBP as well same following result), Finder wouldn't open the external HD, and by clicking on the external HD it made Finder freeze. Trying to relaunch Finder did not make Finder work. Force eject did not work. Tried to use Disk Utility to reformat again, it made DU freeze after clicking on the volume...
Anyone any idea what is wrong with my external HD? I don't really care about the data on there, so how do I reformat it?
Thank you!
EDIT: Tried the WD Quick Formatter, it froze at the "Dismounting Volumes" stage.

There may or may not be a physical fault with the WD drive, but Macs can read but not write to NTFS disks unless you use a third party driver like Paragon NTFS for Mac, or NTFSMounter.
Your post seems to imply that before the current problems it used to be OK (ie you could read and write to it). Have you got NTFS for Mac or similar?
Did you have a reson for formatting NTFS? Mac drives are formatted HFS+. If you want Windows to read Mac disks you can install MacDrive in Windows, and Paragon HFS for Windows.

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You are probably using Time Machine to backup your MacBook Pro, right? Then the additional 300 GB could be local Time Machine snapshots. Time Machine will write the hourly backups to the free space on your hard disk, if the backup drive is temporarily not connected. You do not see these local backups in the Finder, and MacOS will delete them, when you make a regular backup to Time Machine, or when you need the space for other data.
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x

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That's really a question you should be asking Microsoft, however it may have to do with the way the EHD is formatted. Is it formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or is it formatted another way. You can check this by right clicking the EHD, and selecting Information. Of you can select the EHD in Finder and type Command I.

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tt2

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Very easy. Plug in the drive, open Disk Utility (in the Utilities folder which in the Applications folder).
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It takes longer to type how to do it than to actually do it.

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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
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Hi all,
I recently purchased a Western Digital 1TB External Hard Drive. It came formatted for Windows with NTFS, but I didn't think this was a problem as the packaging stated it could easily be reformatted for Mac OS. To cut a long story short, it couldn't. When I plugged it in to my Mac (iMac 21" i3) and tried to use Disk Utility to reformat it, partition it, whatever, it just wouldn't work always returning some sort of error. I resorted to using a Gparted Live CD and succesfully formated it to HFS+ but yet when I plugged it into my Mac it wouldn't mount the disk. After following advice to let Disk Utility 'Repair' the disk, this is the output:
Verify and Repair volume “external”
Checking non-journaled HFS Plus Volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Unused node is not erased (node = 1458) [In red]
Checking catalog file.
Unused node is not erased (node = 5) [In red]
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking catalog hierarchy.
Invalid directory item count [In red]
(It should be 1 instead of 0)
Checking volume bitmap.
Volume bitmap needs minor repair for orphaned blocks [In red]
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume free block count [In red]
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The volume external was found corrupt and needs to be repaired. [In red]
Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files. [In red]
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asad.a wrote:
I believe the reasons behind this must have something to do with the errors highlighted by the repair process (as copied above)- errors I don't understand.
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Go to Disk Utility
Click on the external Drive (not on the existing partition)
Click on Partition section in Disk Utility
In the Pane under "Current Scheme" highlite the Partition and then click the "-" (minus) sign down left.
Click on the dropdown "Current Scheme" and choose a matching scheme
On Format choose "Mac OS extended journaled"
Click "Apply"
Message was edited by: lupunus / typo's fixed

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WD 1TB external hard drive recognized by Mac, but Finder can't open it

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