Hi Captain_WD. Thanks for your reply. There are several backup solutions that you might pick to backup WD Elements drives. Ready for you to use. And sometimes you use your Elements drive on your Mac. Here I’m going to show you two effective solutions to erase WD external hard drives in Windows: Solution 1: erase WD My Passport with WD Drive Utilities. Now, we will show you how to use the WD Sync alternative for Windows – Sync Center. Performance . It is the Sync Center. Similar to WD Elements, WD Easystore is also currently shipping with white-labeled HDDs inside. The WD Elements portable hard drive is infected by virus. You can follow the question or vote as helpful, but you cannot reply to this thread. There is a common need to make WD Elements drives usable on both Windows and Mac so that you can transfer data between the two environments. WD Elements … Generally, it includes Windows 10 desktop, MacBook Pro, SD card, DSLR and external drives, for instance, WD My Passport. File system crashed on WD Elements portable hard drive. Reformatting the WD hard drives when it's not working ; First, See How Mac Recognizes a WD External Hard Drive. Reason I settled with WD is that i have a similar one and no issues. Using Your WD Elements Drive On Your Mac And A PC. Windows also provides you an alternative to the WD Sync. I have a WD Elements SE which I used to back up my MacBook. Download the firmware to your desktop. This guide demonstrates shucking a WD Elements 12TB external hard drive from Western Digital, model WDBWLG0120HBK-NESN, but the procedure can apply to any WD Elements 3.5” external drive. If the WD elements DO need to be reformated to be used on Windows xp – I wonder if someone could write a full description of the entire process for Re-formatting a new (never been used) WD Elements so that it is compatible with Windows xp – (and I am hoping, that this Re-format - will ALSO make to WD elements ALSO STILL compatible with Windows 7 and above. Answer this question Send. Can I transfer using nothing but the WD drive or do I need a transfer cable? That will open up a finder window for you. It is currently NTFS and I am not sure if formatting it to exFAT may cause it to function incorrectly. Partition WD hard drive with Disk Management. Way 5: Use Your WD My Passport Drive With Time Machine. Windows built-in backup software like File History (Windows 8.1, 10), Windows Backup and Restore (Windows 7, 8.1, 10), and the free WD backup software - AOMEI Backupper Standard will do you a big favor. Click the Next button to proceed. Unfortunately I have lost the user manual. Hi there I am wondering if formatting my WD Elements External Hard Drive to exFAT requires the hardrive to be relatvely new (it is quite old) or would need some sort of compatibility label to be used with exFAT. I am now trying to retrieve the files from the back up, but I am struggling to locate my photos within the back up. Backing up Windows or Mac to WD Network Attached Storage (NAS) This article explains how to perform a backup to a My Cloud, WD Sentinel or My Book ... What Is and How To Access a WD Product Dashboard It makes the noise of something being plugged in and gives me a safely remove hardware option but won't give me autoplay or show up in my computer. Many external hard drives use server-grade hard drives that cost nearly twice as much if you were to purchase them standalone without the external enclosure. Windows release 1.2.1.26 (3/11/10) This update includes the following changes to WD … Thankfully, MS-DOS FAT32 and ex-FAT formats have survived to date, and these are the file system to make your WD My Passport work with a Mac and a Windows PC simultaneously. I have wireless network; is that a factor in the transfer? Any advice of where to find them? Use WD Drive Utilities to check the unrecognized WD hard drives; 7. You’re free to create new folders. Now, let’s go to learn more from the following part. All of my files are backed-up to a WD external drive, Currently using Windows 7 on old computer. i have a wd 250Gb external drive using with 32bit win7 laptop. Another way is to try using a third-party WD My Passport Ultra partition manager – MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition. Here are two ways offered and you can choose based on your own situation. To use it to protect your files, you need to download WD Backup, unzip the file into a folder and double click the .exe file to install. If you are using the manual update method, do not rename the firmware file. Connect the hard disk to the computer using a USB cable and wait for a bit so that the device can be recognized. Yes you can use your WD Elements drive for both a Mac and a PC if you want. And now you can use the WD Elements External hard drive as you use your internal hard drive. all updated Windows operating systems. Rest assured this is really easy to do. A WD My Passport formatted with Mac file system will be a dud on the Windows and vice-versa. I then plugged the hard drive in my work laptop which I normally do to exchange work docs and same thing, my laptop couldn't detect it. However, when trying to format WD Elements for Mac, some … Once that is done, click on the "This PC" option and find the icon that represents the Hard disk. Then, how to erase WD My Passport external hard drive easily? due to reasons unknown it is presently showing 149Gb. Updating the firmware on your My Cloud PR4100. How frustrating it is! Apart from WD Passport, you can also format WD Elements for Mac. You’ll see your WD Elements drive is lovely and empty. The simple fact is, you'll be very happy with the shape, weight, look, and even feel of the WD My Passport drive. This is useful if a drive is being used under both Operating System (OS)to move files between the two environments. Sync Center allows you to sync files between PCs and manage offline files which are saved in the folders of the network servers. Connect your hard disk with the computer. Unzip the file and you will find the actual firmware in this format: My_Cloud_PR4100_2.xx.xx.bin The same goes for using any kind of WD drive on Mac. How to erase WD My Passport external hard drive in Windows easily? Can use Windows Easy Transfer … NTFS formatted and works just as fast on Mac using third party app for reading and writing to and from it. Here are two free ways that you use to assign a drive letter for your WD My Passport Ultra. After the transfer, I will connect the external drive to the new computer with Windows 10. Benefits of WD my Passport. The following section tells you how. Enter a volume label (drive name) too — we used “Windows 10,” though you can label this partition with anything. Click on the format option. After realizing that you can reformat WD hard drive to FAT32 or exFAT to make it compatible with Mac OS X and still can be used under Windows, it is time to check out how to reformat WD hard drive for Mac and PC in Windows successfully. WD External Hard Drive Automatic Backup in Windows7/8/10; WD External Hard Drive Automatic Backup in Windows7/8/10. Lose data due to improper operations like pulling out WD Elements portable hard drive when it is transfer data with computer. To disable the Virtual CD - If you are not running WD SmartWare and wish to disable the Virtual CD, click here for instructions. The WD My Passport drive is imperative because the individual will use the portable media to store their collection of videos, photos, docs, and audio safely. 7. Want to use a partition and allocate it to Time Machine for backup? Hi all, I'm new here. WD portable hard drive reformatting software for Windows/Mac. Available in Windows 10/8/7, Disk Management allows you to manage your disks and partitions with a simple, graphical interface. Specifically, when you plug a WD hard drive into a Mac computer, macOS would be notified. However, some of you have reported that WD Backup cannot work well. It’s the option to choose when you mainly use your WD Elements drive on your Windows PC. In order to reformat WD portable hard drive and permanently erase the data on the WD portable hard drive, we strongly recommend you to use this tool – Super Eraser to help you reformat the WD portable hard drive. To achieve this goal, you are supposed to format WD Elements for Mac to FAT32 or exFAT which is compatible on both Windows and Mac. If you have the WD My Passport Ultra not detected Windows 10/8/7 issue, you might as well try this simple fix, especially for … My WD elemnts 1TB drive will not show up on my advent (windows vista) laptop. Installing WD Backup was easy, and of course, all the software and user manuals are on the drive itself. Step 7: Click the Finish button to complete WD Elements / WD easystore; Embedded & Removable Flash; WD ReadyView; Legacy & Other Products; Downloads WD Software; Product Firmware; Product Downloads; Warranty & Returns Warranty Services; Warranty Policy; Data Recovery; Shipping Addresses; Warranty Status; Product Replacement; RMA Status You can use Windows built in utility Disk Management or third party partition software to partition WD hard drive. To use a WD my passport on Mac, you need to know how to reformat it. :mad: Any help will be very much... Windows 10 not compatible with Photoshop Elements 13 in Software and Apps. How to format WD elements SE for Mac on the Windows Operating system? Download this WD portable hard drive reformatting software here: Download for PC Download for Mac. WD Backup can be used in Windows 10, 8.1, 7 and Vista. You can read my document here all about it. It also comes preformatted with NTFS, so you can quickly use it with your Windows device. Step 2. I have a WD Elements external drive which I use for back ups. Although reformatting is required for Mac, you can expect better compatibility with WD Easystore. Double Click On Your WD Elements Drive Icon On Your Desktop. My WD elements drive won't show up on my computer. Format WD Elements failed on Mac. I connect my WD Elements 1042 portable hard drive to my PC running Windows 10. New computer will have Windows 10. If you want to use the drive with a Mac computer, see Reformatting the Drive and Troubleshooting. This answer explains how to format a WD drive for use on Windows and macOS. This thread is locked. USB 3.0 is backward compatible with USB 2.0. Physical Description As shown in figure 2, the My Passport drive has: A USB 3.0 interface port A power/activity LED indicator USB 3.0 Interface The USB 3.0 interface supports data transfer rates up to 5 Gb/s. One is using Windows built-in Disk Management. A Western Digital external hard drive can be used on both Windows and Mac OSX. for information, i have tried disk management, used data lifeguard diagnostic tests and all passed, but the figure still remains the same. WD external hard drive is a good location for automatic backup, and free AOMEI Backupper will help you to easily achieve files, system, disk, or partition auto backup to Western Digital external hard drive within Windows 7/8/10. Doing so will cause the manual update to fail and can corrupt the system. I am trying to discover how to reset it so as to clear out all the old back up's and make space for new one's. WD Sync Alternative for Windows – Sync Center. The process of Mac recognizing an external hard drive is a little complicated even though you can't see it. Step 1. Drag and drop files to it as you would on your internal hard drive. However, the hard drive does not appear in the files menu and I cannot access it. Unexpected power off. Patricia Howell, 16-10-2019 19:04:35 No comments 6 how do I transfer from WD elements to my pc. Most WD Drives come formatted in the NTFS (Windows) or HFS+ (Mac) format. And then you can connect the USB cable into your Windows PC and view and use the files there. Answer this question Send. Yes I tried all the ports, I used the hard drive cable to connect my phone to the laptop and windows explorer detected my phone immediately. The computer sees the hard drive because it appears in devices. 'S not working ; First, see reformatting the WD Sync alternative for –! For a bit so that the device can be used on both Windows and vice-versa 7 and.! 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